Netflix And Chill: Fathers & Daughters (2015)

I am not surprised that Fathers & Daughters was written by someone, Brad Desch, who has no other screenplay credits to his name. It feels very basic in the way the predictable storyline is plotted, and ultimately relies on the talent of the two main stars. What is more surprising is the fact that director Gabriele Muccino is no newcomer. He's done a number of movies in a very similar vein, and a number of his previous films are much better than this one.

Russell Crowe plays Jake Davis, a writer and a loving father who loses his wife in a car crash that also leaves him with some health issues that impact his everyday life. He's also now the single parent of young Katie (Kylie Rogers), but there are other people who don't think that is the best situation for both of them. In the here and now, viewers get to see Katie (now played by Amanda Seyfried) making her way through life, her father absent for reasons to become clear before the end credits roll, and making her way through a number of one-night stands. Until she meets Cameron (Aaron Paul). Happiness may be belatedly coming back into her life, but will she be able to deal with it?

If you like Seyfried and Paul then this movie should work for you. They both try hard to compensate for the weak material with performances that deserve a better movie around them. Crowe, on the other hand, settles into a performance that makes use of far too many familiar "ACTOR" tricks, whether he's angrily defending his ability to look after his young daughter or dealing with the problematic tremors afflicting him post-accident. Diane Kruger is disappointingly underused, but Bruce Greenwood excels as her partner, and the man who has the money and willingness to be diplomatic in offering to welcome young Katie as a permanent resident of their home, and it's good to have Octavia Spencer, Quvenzhané Wallis, and Jane Fonda doing well enough with their limited screentime to make it easier to enjoy things in between moments that have Crowe overdoing things.

Things are quite jarring when you move between watching scenes with a main character as an innocent young girl and then scenes in which she's a woman using sex as some band-aid for a deep well of pain, but the rest of the film is very standard and manipulative stuff. Desch seems to have spent less time writing a full screenplay and more time stringing together a whole load of dialogue and moments he's picked from many superior movies, Muccino thinks that he can rely on his cast to lift everything out of the doldrums, and the cast are too restricted by the material. There are intermittent highlights for fans of the supporting players, but not enough to make this more worthy of your time ahead of at least a hundred other melodramas that people could recommend to you.

4/10

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. All links are HERE.
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

Prime Time: Ash (2025)

Despite the fact that I loathed Kuso, I decided to give this sci-fi horror movie from director Flying Lotus a chance. Writer Jonni Remmler makes his feature debut here, and the nicest thing I can say is that it feels very much like the work of someone making their feature debut.

Eiza González plays Riya, a woman who finds herself in a very difficult situation when she awakens to find that all of her colleagues have either gone missing or been killed. This would be problematic anywhere, but Riya is working in a space station on a distant planet. There's not really anyone around to quickly come to her aid, although someone else (Brion, played by Aaron Paul) does make an unexpected appearance. 

I don't want to sound like a broken record here, and I am keen to see Flying Lotus do something that fully works for me, but this is a film made by a director who is unable to effectively mix his own artistic vision and sensibilities with the genre moments that he ends up fumbling. The end result is something that will please nobody, with a weak script undermining any of the moments that could have been more interesting and a number of visual flourishes that are buried under poor editing choices, some bad lighting, and a constant feeling of apathy.

The sad thing is that the cast here could have done something good with better material. González is a decent lead, although you wouldn't know that from the roles that she has picked over the past few years. The same could be said of Paul, who has yet to find himself a film role that comes remotely close to his superb TV work. Iko Uwais isn't used in the way you might expect, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The bad thing is how he is completely wasted, as are both Beulah Koale and Kate Elliott. Flying Lotus himself also appears onscreen, but I'm not going to judge his work as anything more than a cost-saving measure. That's all you have, a handful of people for the core cast, and that would be all you need if the main premise was strong enough. It isn't though.  

I remember many years ago when I was desperate to find another videogame to scratch that Resident Evil itch. I ended up playing OverBlood. It wasn't very good, but there were moments when it was superficially close enough to Resident Evil that I decided I could be happy with it. That took some willpower, and that was back when I was younger and much easier to please. I'm older and a bit more jaded nowadays. And if I want something to scratch that sci-fi horror movie itch then I have much greater knowledge, and many more resources, than I had when I was spending more time playing on a videogame console than trying to work my way through every movie ever made.

I'll give it a bonus point or two for the FX work, and an ending that tries to reward those who have been patient enough to get there, but that still leaves it as something I rate disappointingly below average.

4/10

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