Geostorm (2017)

Gerard Butler. He comes so close to being an enjoyable movie star, for me, and yet his choice of movies keeps leaving him as a second-tier option, at best. He's given us fun performances in 300 and Olympus Has Fallen but he's also given us performances in The Bounty Hunter and, well, London Has Fallen (which I still sort of enjoyed, but perhaps only because it was better than the prospect of a sequel to The Bounty Hunter). And now he's the star of Geostorm, a disaster movie/thriller about a system of weather satellites that may well be commanded to fall to Earth and cause global chaos and destruction. If you don't want to read this whole review, let me just say that Geostorm does not sit alongside the better Butler films.

Directed by Dean Devlin, who has already destroyed large parts of Earth on numerous occasions with the films he produced with Roland Emmerich, the plot is, well, it's really just what I already mentioned above. Butler plays Jake Lawson, the man who helped to build the system, and who is then sent back up into space to figure out what is happening to the system. Meanwhile, on the ground is his brother, Max (Jim Sturgess), who might just be able to help him figure things out with the help of his secret service girlfriend, Sarah (Abbie Cornish, and don't start me on how badly she needs to change her agent for someone who won't leaver her to be wasted in such thankless roles). You have a mystery plot, you have a number of obvious villains, and you have Butler being the one man who may just be the person able to save our entire planet.

And yet it's all crushingly dull. Yes, this is another CGI-laden blockbuster that forgets to throw in characters you might care for, any hint of believability, and any real weight to the planet-threatening elements. It's so busy showing you the huge scale of the problem that you get nothing more intimate to make it seem more urgent and dangerous.

Butler isn't at his best in the lead role, he can't overcome the weak script, and this isn't a film that works on his strengths. Basically, he doesn't get to be sweary and violent enough. Sturgess and Cornish are almost completely wasted, their characters being used to move the plot along so predictably that I wouldn't be surprised if it was discovered that a scriptwriting app was used to write this film rather than the minds of Devlin and Paul Guyot. Andy Garcia and Ed Harris do a bit better, but that's more to do with the strength of their personalities as opposed to anything from the material, and Alexandra Maria Lara, Daniel Wu, Robert Sheehan, and all of the other cast members struggle to shrug off a script that weighs them all down like an overcoat made of wet cement.

But it's the dullness that remains the biggest problem. Many blockbusters can distract you from a bad script and thin characterisations if the spectacle is good enough. This just doesn't manage that. As realistic as the CGI may be in places, it is also never placed alongside enough actual real elements to ever feel completely convincing, which means viewers are never drawn in or made to feel any tension.

In his ongoing quest to make his disaster movies ever bigger it would appear that Dean Devlin has simply led himself along a path to bigger and bigger disasters, but not in the way he intended.

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 

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

I HOPE that anyone who knows me, even a little bit, knows that I am never a contrarian just for the sake of stirring the pot or getting people into a state of anger. In fact, I try as often as I can to ignore the extreme negatives and positives you can find everywhere on the internet and continue to just form my own opinion about movies, which is the way everyone should do it (then you can have more fun later discussing things with those who agree, and those who don't).

So I didn't make the decision lightly to label the much-loved Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri the worst film directed by either of the McDonagh brothers. You have to remember two things here. First of all, I am one of the few people who really enjoyed War On Everyone. Second, I am not saying this is a terrible film. It's still better than Transformers: The Last Knight, for example. Just not by that much.

The plot revolves around Frances McDormand's character, Mildred. She has been waiting too long to get any justice after her daughter was raped and murdered. So she decides to use three billboards situated on a fairly quiet road to question the work ethic of Sheriff Willoughby (Woody Harrelson). This upsets Willoughby and his staff (particularly the dim and abusive Dixon, played by Sam Rockwell), it upsets Mildred's son (Lucas Hedges), and it starts to turn the town against Mildred as they fail to understand why she would make such a statement.

The performances in this film are, for the most part, pretty great. McDormand does brilliant work, Rockwell is as great as ever, and Harrelson does well (when he isn't delivering lines in voiceover like he's reading the back of a packet of Coco Pops). Caleb Landry Jones is also very good, playing the lad responsible for leasing out the billboard space, Hedges is excellent as the teenage son watching his mother make a stand he doesn't see as being of any use, Peter Dinklage is a lot of fun as someone hoping to take Mildred out on a date, and John Hawkes is an a-grade asshole. The main weakness in the film is Abbie Cornish, who gives what feels like a half-hearted performance, hampered by the fact that she is also given the worst of the dialogue in the film and just seems far too young for her character (she plays the wife of Harrelson's character).

Direction is good enough, with McDonagh really pulling out the stops in a couple of moments that hammer home (almost literally) some of the damage that characters are willing to inflict upon one another, and there's definitely an interesting theme being clumsily explored here, but it's all almost undone by the script, surprisingly enough. While there are gems here, especially in the scenes that have McDormand interacting directly with the local law enforcement, there are also lines that drop in the middle of scenes like anvils looking for a Wile E. Coyote to squash into an accordion shape. And that's just individual lines I am talking about (poor Cornish, I felt genuinely sorry for a couple of the lines that she had to deliver, which could have only been made a bit less cringeworthy if McDonagh had given her any decent characterisation beforehand). As the film starts to develop in the overlong second half, everything starts to become more heavy-handed and also a bit, well, implausible and ridiculous. What began as a small, impactful, drama turns into something that feels unsure of how far it wants to take things, and in what direction it wants to go. Yes, this is in line with the main characters but it doesn't feel deliberate or well thought out. It feels careless, displaced, and even rather immature.

There's enough here to enjoy, and I feel sorry for those trying to dismiss the movie as something it isn't (I can't say any more because of spoilers), and I still encourage people to support the McDonagh brothers ahead of so many other writers and directors who never try to engage and challenge their audience, but this didn't work half as well for me as it seems to have worked for so many others.

6/10

Sci-Fi September: RoboCop (2014)

Despite my love for the original movie, and my worry at the sanitisation of the material in an attempt to reach a wider audience, I was willing to give this new version of RoboCop a shot, I really was. Let's be honest, despite the intense violence of the original movie, the main character was eventually watered down and repackaged for kids anyway, in everything from TV shows to action figures to computer games. Yes, I have fond memories of that side-scrolling shooter that I played on my chunky little ZX Spectrum, and I'm sure many others of my generation have similar recollections.

Anyway, here's the thing, RoboCop starts off quite well. It's taking a different tack from the original movie, deciding to focus more on the idea of free will than the struggle between man and machine parts, although that also plays a big part in the film. Joel Kinnaman is the main character, Officer Murphy. He is seriously injured when he gets too close to some major criminals, and OCP gain permission from his wife (Abbie Cornish) to give him a second chance to live, albeit in a robotic shell that will house the small remains of his organic body. Gary Oldman is the doctor in charge of the project, Michael Keaton is the man looking for a return on his invested money, and Jackie Earle Haley simply seems intent on appearing in as many piss-poor remakes as possible.

Jose Padilha is a great director, he has some titles that are well worth checking out, but I won't list his filmography here. Unfortunately, you wouldn't know that from his work here. He's saddled with a lame script by Joshua Zetumer, Edward Neumeier, and Michael Miner, but that's not really an excuse for how badly he starts to fumble and drop the ball after the first 20-30 minutes. A sequence showing RoboCop going through an evaluation test, accompanied by a Focus song, Hocus Pocus, holds up as the first major low. It's bloodless, unexciting, messy, and far too similar to just watching a videogame, albeit one far more advanced than my ZX Spectrum games. And most of the scenes that come along afterwards just stick to that level.

Kinnaman is far too bland in the lead role, unfortunately, and Cornish is stuck with the same motivation for 80% of the movie - to get near her husband and feel that he's still the man she knew and loved for so long. Thankfully, there are other performances that help to make the whole thing bearable. Samuel L. Jackson is a lot of fun as an opinionated TV presenter, Jay Baruchel is enjoyable in a small role, and Haley actually does his best with the character he's given. But it's Keaton and Oldman who are the undoubted highlights, with the former able to rise above shallow characterisation simply thanks to his natural charisma, and the latter benefitting from the fact that he has the best character in the whole film. He may do what he's told by Keaton, but it's always clear that he struggles with his own urge to help his fellow man.

As everything meanders to an unexciting, and entirely predictable, finale it's all too easy to start agreeing with the many people who cursed the movie before it was even released. Many expected the worst, due to the rating and redesign of the central character. They got it. We all got it. This is a stinker. So bad that I wouldn't even recommend buying it for a dollar.

3/10

http://www.amazon.com/Robocop-Blu-ray-Joel-Kinnaman/dp/B00JL6L4WC/ref=sr_1_3?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1411245934&sr=1-3&keywords=robocop