Netflix And Chill: Family Switch (2023)

Jennifer Garner is Jess, a busy mother with a successful career. She doesn't really like her daughter, CC (Emma Myers), focusing on playing football matches ahead of other ways to fill her time. Jess is married to Bill (Ed Helms), and neither of them seem to realise how their son, Wyatt (Brady Noon), is doing at school. Wyatt is a very smart young man, but he's very uncool and a bit miserable. There's also a baby. And a dog. This is the family at the heart of Family Switch, a film in which a familiar Freaky Friday scenario happens to the mother and daughter, to the father and son, AND to the baby and family dog.

Based on the book "Bedtime For Mommy", by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Family Switch is brought to the screen by writers Victoria Strouse and Adam Sztykiel, and director McG. While none of these names tend to instil pure joy in the hearts of most film fans, I would say that all of them have had times when they have managed to deliver decent entertainment (and McG has been working particularly well on Netflix projects). Sadly, Family Switch fails in almost every way it tries to work.

It’s a Christmas film that doesn’t make any decent use of the holiday, a bodyswap movie that mistakenly assumes more is better, and a star vehicle that wastes the more established names in the cast. And you just know that everyone involved thought they were making something in line with the classics of this particular sub-genre, which explains the scene in which the characters onscreen cheekily reference a number of other titles that are all much better than this.

Garner and Helms get the worse end of the stick, perhaps simply due to them having to act like teenagers for most of the runtime, but both Noon and Myers improve every scene that they’re in. Both of the younger screen stars are likable and funny, and I will look forward to whatever is next for them much more than I will look forward to whatever Garner and Helms line up. There aren’t many standouts in the supporting cast, although both Rita Moreno and Matthias Schweighöfer have fun in their small roles, and the less said about the CGI helping to visualize the swapped behaviour of the baby and the family dog the better.

There are a couple of laughs here and there (I don’t mind a heavily-signposted fart gag on occasion), a dance number that feels shoe-horned in to remind you of other dance numbers we have seen in this kind of fare, and a very safe and predictable finale you could almost write up once everything has been set up in the earliest scenes.

Not a good Christmas movie (I really wouldn’t even count it, considering the lack of holiday spirit, and I am very easygoing with movie labels), not a good bodyswap movie, and not a very good comedy. It’s just not good.

3/10

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Black Adam (2022)

Dwayne Johnson spent a lot of time in the run up to the release of Black Adam by telling people that "the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe is about to change". I'm not sure anyone really believed him, but I was certainly willing to give him a chance to strut his stuff in a full-on superhero movie. It's probably going to be the only Black Adam movie we get, at least for now, and one or two quick-witted people online have already made an observation about the irony of Johnson being "dethroned" due to, well, a change in the hierarchy of power at DC.

It’s really easy to sun up this film. Adam is woken up by some people, he is pretty angry, and he starts to cause a lot of damage to property and people in the country of Kahndaq. A few talented individuals, known as the Justice Society, are sent to meet with Adam. If he cannot be reasoned with then he must be stopped. Which is strange, considering that Kahndaq hasn’t been of interest to the likes of the Justice Society while the people have been suffering under forces of oppression. Some people believe that Adam will be the savior of Kahndaq, but many more believe him to be a powerful threat to the entire world. There’s a much bigger threat on the way though. As always.

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, delivering a film that is in line with most of the standard DC movies of the past few years (big in scale, plenty of polish, but just a little bit of extra grit and seriousness to remind you that DC desperately wants to be more than just escapist fun), Black Adam is, for the most part, surprisingly dull. Or maybe it isn’t that surprising. After all, the character is so similar to Superman that a lot of the big superhero moments feel overly familiar, and the plotting is as predictable as expected. That didn’t stop me from enjoying the last team-up between Collet-Serra and Johnson (the fun Jungle Cruise), but this feels like a step down. The balance is wrong, especially when the moments of actual heroism are the least enjoyable moments of the film.

Writers Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines, and Sohran Noshirvani go through the motions for over half of the runtime, but at least it feels like Haines and Noshirvani are happy to be given such a big blockbuster in which they can make some interesting points about American intervention around the world and the ways in which different countries can help or hinder one another. This strand is the most interesting part of Black Adam, and you know it has to be pushed aside for a grand finale that will be overflowing with the usual display of visual FX. I admit that I enjoyed the look of the main villain here, but it was, as with most of the movie, tiresomely familiar.

Johnson is very good in the lead role here, as you expect him to be, and he gets a chance to show some actual acting, as opposed to just dominating the screen with his presence and bulk. It’s not all through the film, but it’s there, and credit where credit is due. Pierce Brosnan and Aldis Hodge are two senior members of the Justice Society, both doing their best to remain confident and cool in ridiculous costumes, and Noah Centineo and Quintessa Swindell are enjoyable enough as younger superheroes. Sarah Shahi is a good non-superpowered character, Marwan Kenzari does fine in depicting a character journey that keeps him on a rigidly set path, and young Bodhi Sabongui is the boy at the heart of the tale (the Edward Furlong to Johnson’s caped “terminator”) and my opinion of his performance is best summed up by me saying that Edward Furlong was arguably the weak point of that movie, but Sabongui doesn’t even manage to get to that level.

There are a lot of fun little Easter eggs dotted throughout this, eagle-eyed DC fans will find plenty to amuse them, and the technical side of things, from the special effects to the score, the production design to the audio work, is all as good as it should be. It’s easy to see why this didn’t set the world alight though. And it is now further weakened by a post-credit scene that is Joe rendered completely pointless. 

5/10

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Scoob! (2020)

An attempt to give the Scooby-Doo brand a shot in the arm, Scoob! may fall a bit short for fans due to two main points. And one of those is the fact that the brand never feels like it needs a shot in the arm (and this is from someone who quite enjoyed the live-action movies).

The story starts with Shaggy (voiced by Will Forte) meeting a little Scooby (voiced by Frank Welker, so that is a plus). The two then meet the rest of "Mystery, Inc" before that was formed - Fred (Zac Efron), Velma (Gina Rodriguez), and Daphne (Amanda Seyfried). Years pass by, a montage shows the gang doing what they do (in a wonderfully-recreated copy of the opening titles of the cartoon I grew up with), and life is good. Which makes it a perfect time for the group to be split up, with Shaggy and Scooby meeting the Blue Falcon (Mark Wahlberg), and possibly helping to foil some nefarious plan by Dick Dastardly (Jason Isaacs).

You might have already surmised the other main problem people may have with Scoob! Yes, as seems to be the norm now for companies wanting to get lots and lots of money coming in . . . this film is also an attempt to create some kind of bizarre Hanna-Barbera movie universe. You get Blue Falcon and company, you get Dick Dastardly and Muttley, and you get a small role for Captain Caveman (and whoever thought Tracy Morgan was the best choice to voice one of my favourite cartoon characters was so far wrong that I hope they spend many sleepless nights thinking about what they have done).

The script, written by a few different scribes, works in the first third, generally, before trying to fit the gang into a wider movie universe. Then it all goes to pot, one or two witty, meta lines aside.

The same may be said of the direction from Tony Cervone, although his hands are tied by the script. But everything becomes a long, slow slide downhill once the main mystery comes into play.

The voice voice cast generally do well. It's a shame that nobody offered Lillard the chance to return to the role he made his own, but Forte doesn't do too bad as an alternative. Efron, Rodriguez, and Seyfried are a good match for their characters, Welker does his usual excellent work (which really goes without saying), and Isaacs has a lot of fun as Dick Dastardly. Unfortunately, the rest don't really fit in, be it Whalberg and his companions (voiced by Ken Jeong and Kiersey Clemons), or that unforgivable mis-casting for the Captain Caveman role. And let's not mention the clanging Simon Cowell cameo.

Scooby-Doo isn't a property that you should be able to mess up so easily, certainly not in animated form. But the creative forces behind this film manage it.

Consider my rating generous, with at least one point just for the sweet glow of nostalgia.

4/10
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Rampage (2018)

Say what you like about Dwayne Johnson, the man can do silly action spectacle with an admirably straight face (well, an arched eyebrow or pec twitch notwithstanding). He knows that he's not going to be called upon to do anything too serious, not yet anyway, and he most often stays comfortably in his wheelhouse. That might sound like I'm being a bit condescending and snooty but I'm really not. I enjoy seeing Johnson in most movies, he even tries to do his best in dross like Baywatch, but he excels at action fare, and he can sell some of the most ridiculous cinematic moments in recent years without viewers throwing their hands up in disgust and giving up on the movie. Who else could believably grab a speeding missile and turn it back towards enemies that were trying to kill him?

Rampage, loosely based on the videogame that I even managed to enjoy on my old, rubber-keyed, Spectrum 48K, is silly action spectacle. There's the main plot itself, a large albino gorilla is turned into a HUGE albino gorilla, with some anger issues, and there are also another couple of big creatures heading towards Chicago to cause massive amounts of destruction as they go on their . . . rampage. There are also the plot details, silliness wrapped in tech-speak to try and make it all sound plausible. You may think the conversations about genetic manipulation and pathogens are laughable, because they are, but they do the minimum required to kickstart the plot and explain events, as long as you don't think about what has been said as you move on to the next scene of entertaining destruction. And, if you need even more silliness, there's a moment that sees Johnson trying to use a damaged helicopter to surf/hover his way down a collapsing tower.

Johnson is very much at ease amidst all of the preposterous set-pieces, emanating his usual charisma and souped-up muscle power. He spends a lot of the runtime alongside Naomie Harris, who does well to avoid being overshadowed while she delivers most of the exposition in between the thrills, and the two human stars are overshadowed, but not literally, by some impressive CGI beasties. Jeffrey Dean Morgan gets to be amusingly charming and ambiguous as the man who is hoping to clean up the debris and capture the creatures, and Malin Akerman and Jake Lacy are the humans who need to weigh up their self-interests alongside the carnage.

Director Brad Peyton previously delivered this kind of Johnson-led spectacle with San Andreas, so we know that he CAN give audiences what they want (well, he kept me happy enough), but there's something here that's a bit lacking. I still found enough to enjoy, I was entertained enough by the scale of the destruction, but maybe having to incorporate enough little nods to the original videogame was enough to detract from a more simplistic slice of fun. Yes, I realise that I just accused Rampage of not being simplistic enough. It took four writers to make this. Four. To write a script that turns that classic videogame into a mainstream blockbuster.

Still, it's better than Battleship.

6/10

The blu can be bought here.
Americans can buy it here.