For It Is Man's Number: kevin etten

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Friday, 13 February 2026

Anaconda (2025)

If the world was crying out for a comedic reboot of the Anaconda movie series then nobody decided to mention that to me. There's a chance that the world wasn't crying out for such a thing, but then . . . why would this exist otherwise?

Jack Black plays Doug McCallister, a man stuck making wedding videos when he really wants to be directing movies. His long-time friend, Ronald Griffin Jr. (Paul Rudd), is an actor unable to really gain any momentum in his career. Ronald doesn't have much going for him, but he does have the rights to Anaconda, apparently, which leads to him convincing Doug, Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) to travel to the Amazon and rework a movie they all have a strangely strong connection with. They meet Ana (Daniela Melchior) once over there, a capable woman who ends up being added to the small cast of their movie, and eventually also meet a very real, and very large, anaconda.

Written by Kevin Etten and directed by Tom Gormican, who both entertained me with their last collaboration, The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent, this is one of the strangest and least satisfying mainstream movies I have watched in some time. Okay, I wasn't exactly hyped for this when I first heard about the tonal change in the series, but I still assumed that my appreciation of the main cast members would allow me to get some enjoyment from it. I was VERY wrong.

Jack Black can be very funny, Paul Rudd is someone I consider a bit of a treasure, Steve Zahn has been delivering delightful turns for decades now, and Thandiwe Newton has done enough good work by now to make me forgive her stilted performance in the second Mission: Impossible movie. I want to be clear about how much I like all of these people in the right movies. This is not the right movie. It's a tonal mess that doesn't do well enough with the jokes about film-making, doesn't deliver any proper snakey thrills, and doesn't have anything else going for it, with the exception of a couple of fun cameos. Zahn is a highlight, but Dan Silveira upstages everyone as a snake-handler named Timo who has the advantage of possessing a snake that he claims is friendly and obedient, despite the size of the thing. Melchior, and the entire sub-plot that she's involved with, feels completely unnecessary, and I would have much preferred the movie to concentrate on the other added conflict that is brought up at just around the halfway mark before being fumbled and discarded within the space of a few scenes.

Undemanding viewers should still find one or two chuckles here, but they're too few and far between throughout the 99-minute runtime. Other than those fleeting bright spots, nothing else works. At all. And it's saying something when you watch a 2025 Anaconda movie and start thinking fondly of the uneven special effects in the 1997 film.

Maybe not the worst mainstream movie I've seen this decade, but I am currently struggling to think of one I would rank below it.

3/10

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Sunday, 7 July 2024

Netflix And Chill: Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (2024)

It's easy to see how this film, the fourth feature in the Beverly Hills Cop series, came about, especially when you look at the entertainment landscape and see the money being made from the good old nostalgia train. There may be another new director behind the camera, Mark Molloy (making his feature debut), and the writing team of Will Beall, Tom Gornican, and Kevin Etten also adds plenty of Beverly Hills newcomers, but what matters most is Eddie Murphy being back in the title role, Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Paul Reiser, and Bronson Pinchot making themselves available to reprise their characters, and a soundtrack that tries to recreate every sonic beat from the original.

It's all very basic stuff. Axel Foley (Murphy) ends up returning to Beverly Hills when he is informed about his estranged daughter's life being in danger. His daughter, Jane (Taylour Paige), is a lawyer who is about to defend an alleged cop killer, but she suspects that there are some dirty cops trying to frame an innocent man. Billy Rosewood (Reinhold) is now a PI who also believes that there are some cops involved in this crime, John Taggart (Ashton) is now the Chief, and Captain Cade Grant is a main supporting character played by Kevin Bacon in a way that doesn't make his character completely obvious from his very first scene. Okay, it's obvious. This is the Columbo style of mystery story-telling, with the main satisfaction due to be derived from seeing how Foley catches the person he instinctively knows is the main villain. There's also a helpful detective named Bobby Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who has just as much interest in keeping Jane safe as they have a shared past as a couple.

Look, it's hard to go into this without knowing what you're letting yourself in for. In that regard, anyone coming away from it feeling short-changed or miserable only really has themselves to blame. That's not to say that this can still leave viewers feeling disappointed, and I was left sadly disappointed, but it basically delivers what it tells you it will deliver. Murphy slips back into his character with relative ease, older, but not necessarily a hell of a lot wiser, and the other series (semi-)regulars turn up to wave and remind you of what you enjoyed about the interactions of everyone the first time around. The structure of the plotting, various lines of dialogue, and the soundtrack choices all work together to ensure that you watch this wrapped up in a cosy glow. It's a shame that there's nothing else accompanying that glow though, and that glow alone just wasn't enough for me.

Murphy has had mixed success in recent years, and it's obvious why he has returned to some past glories (is he currently developing a belated sequel to Trading Places and another 48. Hrs movie? probably not, but I wouldn't be surprised), but he doesn't know how to star in an Eddie Murphy vehicle that also works as well for others around him. Paige is fantastic, and it's good to have someone who actually stands up to the antics of Foley nowadays, even if she has the benefit of being a blood relative, but Gordon-Levitt feels wasted, and sorely out of place, and most of the time watching Reinhold, Ashton, and Reiser is tinged with sadness as viewers are constantly reminded of how age has wearied them. Pinchot is a highlight, as he has been in his previous appearances in this series, and Bacon is very comfortable in a role that he could do in his sleep.

The director and writing team do what they're tasked with doing, but they sadly don't do any more. It doesn't help that everything looks and feels more like a Netflix film than a Beverly Hills Cop movie (a bit tricky to define, but you will know it when you see it . . . something polished that often feels like it has been filmed in front of a whole lot of unnecessary greenscreen). The laughs don't come thick and fast enough, the action is bigger, but not better, and many of the supporting characters feel like popular guest stars on a long-running sit-com. That doesn't make it the worst movie you could choose to watch this weekend, but it does make it the worst of the Beverly Hills Cop movies, despite the fact that it at least has Foley doing some proper detective work again.

4/10

Tuesday, 21 June 2022

The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent (2022)

The film in which Nicolas Cage famously plays an onscreen version of . . . Nicolas Cage, The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent is a film that obviously depends on how much you like Nicolas Cage. But that is something you could say about almost every Cage vehicle. This just happens to be his best film in quite a few years.

Cage is in a bit of a rut. His stock seems to be low, he has problems staying on good terms with his ex-wife (Sharon Horgan) and his daughter (Lily Mo Sheen), and he seems to be in the midst of a crisis that has no end in sight. Then his agent (Neil Patrick Harris) offers him a gig that could turn everything around, a payday for visiting a superfan named Javi (Pedro Pascal). Nick and Javi start getting on really well, which makes it a tough break when two agents (Tiffany Hadish and Ike Barinholtz) collar Cage and ask him to help them. It appears that Javi is a MAJOR criminal, and he may well have a kidnapped girl hidden away somewhere in his compound.

Although I was happy to see this film, and to see the positive reception it received, I must admit to also resenting those who seem to represent the majority viewpoint depicted here. There are a lot of people who dismiss Cage, who have viewed him as a bit of a punchline, who won’t watch most movies that he stars in. It’s their loss. Yes, his movie choices over the past decade have been a bit hit and miss, with quantity overshadowing quality, but Cage is always aiming to do what he does best, and any career renaissance being touted now is touted from people who have decided to selectively forget the gems that remain strewn throughout every period of his extensive filmography.

Putting that aside, however, this is about as good as it gets for a comedy crafted around the perceived persona, and key films, of a majorly divisive movie star. The affection for Cage is obvious, and the material, and gags, work brilliantly while weaving from the universal to the very star-specific. Comedy fans should enjoy this, film fans will love it, and Cage fans should REALLY love it. Director Tom Gormican, who also wrote the script with Kevin Etten, does a superb job of balancing the various elements, from the sheer Cage factor of Cage to the bromance that blossoms at the heart of the film, from the family problems that our hero is unable to face head on, to the brief action beats that are interspersed throughout.

The cast all do a great job, with Cage being the one most obviously deserving of praise. His performance taps into everything, good and bad, that people know, or think they know, about him. He has always had an interesting level of self-awareness, and this whole movie underlines that in a way that is impossible to dislike. Pascal is a lot of fun, being someone who can see no wrong in his idol, and he is amusingly oblivious to much of the plot unfolding around him. Horgan and Sheen do well in their supporting roles, as do Haddish and Barinholtz, and there are a couple of great cameos that I won’t spoil here. Paco León is also very good, playing someone related to Pascal’s character, and someone who may be more attuned to the covert mission that Cage is on.

It’s not any new cinematic milestone. Movie stars have played themselves onscreen before, and there’s more than a touch of something like ¡Three Amigos! about it, but this all blends together into something that feels wonderfully original and entertaining, with a lot of that simply being down to the Cage factor.

8/10