Prime Time: War Of The Worlds (2025)

If I see anything worse than War Of The Worlds before the end of this year then I will be astonished. It's one of the most painful, but also laughable, movies I have seen in some time. Even the mega-flop of Megalopolis at least had some ambition, and a genuine feeling of someone trying to present a (misguided?) vision. This is just amateur-ish, uninteresting, and horribly cynical, especially when it comes to a third act that relies so heavily on some embarrassing product placement.

Presented as a "screenlife" feature (a film with all of the events depicted on one screen or another), although I am not sure it even manages to stay with that format for the 91-minute runtime, this shows a Department of Homeland Security officer (Will Radford, played by Ice Cube) doing his best to respond to unbelievable events when a bit of strange weather turns into an alien invasion. Tripods rise up, an attack begins, and Will tries to figure out counter-measures, while also trying to keep his adult children safe. 

The feature directorial debut from Rich Lee, a man who has directed a multitude of music videos and worked on the visual effects on some big blockbusters through the past few decades, this is staggeringly incompetent in almost every way. The biggest problem is the screenplay, written by Marc Hyman and Kenny Golde (credited as Kenneth A. Golde). Obviously believing that they are being clever and relevant with their updated version of the classic tale, which has the alien invaders looking to gobble up massive amounts of data, Hyman and Golde show that they cannot manage to do well with either the dialogue or the plotting. Having Ice Cube in the lead role allows for him to blurt out some "Ice Cube-isms" (even if nobody else would describe them in that way), but that's all this has going for it. And that's nowhere near enough.

I tend to enjoy Cube in movies. He can do good work. Not here though. It's almost painful to watch him overreact and over-explain in every main sequence, making up for the fact that almost all of his activity is moving between a variety of windows and typing things out on his keyboard. Iman Benson and Henry Hunter Hall are the endangered family members, and both benefit from the fact that they don't have to carry so much of the movie on their shoulders. Which isn't to say they're actually good. Eva Longoria makes an appearance that amounts to a brief cameo, Andrea Savage is an expendable FBI Agent, and even Clark Gregg highlights the mishandling of the material in the moments that have him acting like a parody of his NSA Director character. It's also worth mentioning Devon Bostick, although his character is responsible for the worst parts of the film.

However bad you think this is . . . it's even worse. There's no real sense of spectacle or scale, no actual tension, and most of the runtime has the cast members acting as if they're just taking part in a table read before delivering the full performance at another time. As for one of the main turns taken by the plot at about the halfway point, it's just as cringe-inducingly bad as everything else. 

There's a moral here about surveillance and the use of data, but the main moral I would offer people is to avoid surveilling this particular travesty. 

1/10

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Thelma (2024)

I would usually be upset by an action movie that didn't have a decent amount of full-on action in it, but Thelma is an exception to the rule. It's a film that makes great use of some action movie tropes, delivering laughs and genuine tension throughout, and proves wholly satisfying, despite also making time and space for some moving commentary on the pros and cons of growing old.

June Squibb plays the title character, a 93-year-old woman who ends up giving thousands of dollars to a phone scammer pretending to be her grandson, Daniel (Fred Hechinger). Not only does this affect her finances, it starts a conversation about whether or not she is still able to live on her own. Determined to prove that she isn’t ready to be placed in a nursing home, Thelma embarks on a quest to retrieve her stolen money, reluctantly accepting the assistance of Ben (Richard Roundtree) on the way.

Written and directed by Josh Margolin, making his feature debut, this is a film full of unexpected delights. Whether it’s a chase sequence involving mobility scooters or a Mission: Impossible style mini-heist showing an elderly woman dealing with a carpeted set of stairs before trying to reach the top of a wardrobe, the juxtaposition of action movie elements with the advanced age of our main character makes for wonderful entertainment. The film manages to deliver much more than that one joke though (and it should be noted that the joke is about the genre standards, not about our main characters). What Margolin does with the messaging of the movie is intertwine it deftly in a way that makes it all very clear and obvious without it ever feeling unnecessary or unwelcome. The fun and the commentary are like two strands on a firmly bonded double helix.

It helps that Squibb is such a delight in the lead role. She may not completely convince as a badass, but she does enough to get by, and she absolutely convinces as someone unwilling to let her lifestyle be dictated by her advanced age. Her body may not always act in the way she wants it to, but her mind is almost as sharp as ever. Roundtree does very well alongside her, also struggling with his situation, albeit in a different way, and showing a vulnerability that is accompanied by his much less vulnerable essence of the macho man we've seen him play in films over many decades. Hechinger is very sweet and likeable as Daniel, Parker Posey and Clark Gregg are Thelma's daughter and son-in-law, respectively, and both spend a lot of the movie being very concerned about an old woman they seem to constantly underestimate, and there's a fantastic role for Malcolm McDowell by the time we get well into the third act.

As long as you know that this is going to be more Moderate & Agitated than Fast & Furious then you should find a lot to enjoy. It shouldn't really work as well as it does, I certainly didn't expect to sometimes be tensing up or to feel so satisfied as the final scenes played out, but Margolin shows that thrills and set-pieces don't need big budgets or global stakes. They just need to have the right character in the middle of everything, and that will guarantee that you will be seriously invested in how they navigate the perils around them.

8/10

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Spartan (2004)

As enjoyable and smart as any of his other works, Spartan is another great script by David Mamet that's backed up with his solid direction. It may feel more open than many of his previous works, but it's still very much a character piece full of the cool dialogue and twisty turny mindgames that populate all Mamet movies.

Val Kilmer plays the lead character, Scott, a top military man who helps find out just who has what it takes for life in the tougher roles. He is asked to help out when the daughter of someone very important goes missing, but as the investigation uncovers a number of uncomfortable details it soon becomes clear to some people that Scott may end up causing embarrassment for some. When the case comes to an end, Scott then finds himself in a very strange situation. The mind that was so valued by the military, and his country, has now put him in a lot of danger.

There's nothing here that's really original, especially to viewers who have enjoyed the wealth of American TV detective shows in recent years (from the C.S.I to Monk, as the best examples), but what is here is given a thin coating of just enough paint to make it seem nice and new. The direction, also by Mamet, is unspectacular, but it's probably no coincidence that Mamet the director knows how best to serve the material provided by Mamet the writer.

Kilmer is great in the lead role, it's certainly one of his best performances in the past decade (which, admittedly, isn't saying much since he started to slide downhill in his career, sadly . . . . . I am still holding out for a great comeback though). The supporting cast features Clark Gregg, William H. Macy, Derek Luke, Kristen Bell, Aaron Stanford and Ed O'Neill, and all of them do good enough work, despite Bell being the weak link. Macy is particularly good fun, while the twists and turns make every performance worth closer scrutiny than usual.

It's not quite up there with some of Mamet's better movies, but this is still a very good film indeed, and one that deserves to retain a loyal fanbase through the years.

8/10

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Avengers Assemble (2012)

And so it appears at last (albeit with an annoying title change so that we easily confused Brits don't think Steed and Emma Peel are coming back to the big screen this year), the  film that looks set to be the mightiest of superhero movies, the royal rumble of the Marvel cinematic universe, the geekgasm for comic book fans. With Joss Whedon directing (and co-writing the script with Zak Penn), Avengers Assemble actually manages to be all of this and more.

For anyone adjusting to the sunlight and the sights around them after coming out of some decade-long hibernation, here is the plot. Loki (Tom Hiddleston), last seen causing major trouble for Thor (Chris Hemsworth), has managed to get himself to Earth with a device that can run on self-sustaining energy and grow more and more powerful. Loki hopes to use this device to bring a warring alien race to Earth, cause mayhem and chaos, and then lord it over all he surveys. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) really doesn't want this to happen so he enlists the help of the superheroes that he knows and thinks up to the task. Captain America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor, Dr. Bruce Banner/The Incredible Hulk (played by Mark Ruffalo in both forms), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and, hopefully, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). The biggest problem is that these characters don't play well together, something that Loki soon realises as he puts strain upon strain on their relationships (even completely taking over one or two characters to do his bidding). There's also the ever-dependable Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) and Agent Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders).

Most of the cast here have already grown into their characters in a previous movie (with Robert Downey Jr. perfecting his great patter in two enjoyable Iron Man films) but viewers may be most surprised to find that the person who comes near to stealing every scene here is Mark Ruffalo, arguably the best onscreen interpretation yet of the man who fears his own uncontrollable strength and rage. In a script full of great one-liners he also comes close to bagging two of the top five spots (though the absolutely greatest retort comes from Loki in a comment so funny that the cinema audience I saw the film with was laughing hard for the next full minute). But the best, and most impressive, thing about Avengers Assemble is just how everyone gets their share of great moments without the movie feeling overlong or bloated in any way. You may go into this film with a favourite that you're looking forward to seeing but I guarantee that you come out of it loving the entire group and struggling to pick an outright favourite moment. Which all goes to show just how much praise Tom Hiddleston also deserves for making Loki such a memorable and worthy villain, a perfect mix of camp and menace and scheming (his outburst to Black Widow in one particular scene ranks up there with some of the very best rants by cinematic baddies ever).

The writing is as sharp as you would expect. Okay, this isn't necessarily a film for complete newcomers (if there ARE any) but it sketches out enough details to keep most people happy and it does a great job of following major plot strands through a whole cat's cradle of different sub-strings. There are also at least four great action set-pieces, just as important to a film of this type, and the barnstorming finale features a superb mix of CGI, witticisms and sheer spectacle.

As you would expect from Whedon, he knows what fans want. I think that most people will be like myself, eager to like the film even before the opening titles come up. But with great anticipation comes, of course, the chance for great disappointment. Thankfully, there's absolutely nothing to worry about here. Whedon shows in almost every sequence that he knows just what audiences want, the action may be fast and frantic on many occasions but there are many times when the camera is pulled back and viewers are allowed to revel in a moment of sheer fan-pleasing awesomeness (be it simple joy at the scale of the action or an extended shot of Hulk having a smashing time).

2012 is already shaping up to be a great year for BIG cinematic spectacle (I am also drooling with anticipation at the thought of going to see Prometheus and The Dark Knight Rises) and Avengers Assemble has already set a very high bar for blockbuster quality. Did I want to go back and watch it again as soon as the credits rolled? Yes. Am I looking forward to reliving the whole thing on shiny disc format? Yes. Am I already very, VERY eager for a sequel? I think you know the answer to that one.

9/10

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