Apartment 7A (2024)

Stop reading this review right now if you want to enjoy ANY part of this movie. Seriously, I am not aiming to spoil anything, but Apartment 7A should be much more enjoyable for those who know absolutely nothing about it until they start to piece the familiar elements together for themselves.

Consider yourself duly warned.

Julia Adams plays a young dancer named Terry. Despite a hunger for career success, Terry ends up injuring herself in a way that could possibly spell the ruination of her dream. Terry, aiming to find ways to get herself in front of the right people and grasp whatever last opportunity she might get, does have one apparent stroke of good luck. She encounters an elderly couple (played by Dianne Wiest and Kevin McNally) who end up offering her somewhere to stay, as well as much more. But what do they want in return?

Directed by Natalie Erika James, who has done much better work elsewhere, and also co-written by James, Christian White, and Skylar James, this is a disappointingly unscary and predictable feature that is seriously hampered by the fact that viewers will know where things are going. If you somehow avoided the poster/marketing imagery, which clues you in on the fact that this is a prequel to what many view as a classic horror, and somehow don’t recognise the names and behaviour of the characters helping our lead, then there’s a chance that you might enjoy this a bit more. I suspect you will still find it quite dull though, and it’s a shame that none of the writers could figure out a way to make this anything more than a pale and insipid tribute to the film that birthed it.

Despite the weak material they have to work with, the cast are almost all doing very good work. Adams is a good lead, even if this isn't her best work, but a number of scenes are completely stolen by Wiest and McNally (with Wiest, in particular, reminding me of how much I miss her in major movie roles). Jim Sturgess is decent, playing the man who can make or break Terry's dancing career, and Marli Siu, playing a friend named Annie, gets to continue building a nicely varied filmography of interest to those who took notice of her about a decade ago.

There is at least one other recent horror movie that this reminded me of, and I didn't like that one either (The First Omen), BUT this is a slight improvement. Maybe it's because my memory of Rosemary's Baby is a bit hazy (yes, this is a prequel to Rosemary's Baby, I did warn you not to read further if you didn't know anything about the film before now), or maybe there were a handful of moments here that didn't feel like people just marking off a checklist. Either way, this was watchable, but who would choose to ever rewatch it when you can just revisit Rosemary's Baby?

4/10

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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

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