Netflix And Chill: The Bad Batch (2016)

The second feature film from writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour (after getting plenty of rave reviews for the excellent A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night), The Bad Batch couldn't be much further removed from that fairly quiet, subtle, and black and white, work. This is bright, brash, and happy to pilfer scenes and ideas from a whole litany of films that wander through similar "post-apocalyptic" terrain. Seeing what Amirpour has done throughout her career, however, it becomes clear that this is a woman who doesn't want to be hemmed in by any expectations or genre boundaries.

Let me begin by saying that I put the words "post-apocalyptic" in quotation marks here because, well, that's not really the case. All we know, as the film begins, is that the USA has created a huge area in a desert outside Texas that it uses to house people it deems undesirable. There are no laws there, and no citizenship. Suki Waterhouse plays Arlen, the latest person to be sent into this dangerous place, and it's not long until she ends up on the wrong end of hungry cannibals. A few meals later, requiring one of her legs and arms as prime ingredients, Arlen plots her escape, and ends up in a much safer, and better, location. A few months go by, and Arlen can't stop thinking about revenge against those who disfigured her for the sake of a sick recipe. Revenge doesn't always pan out the way you expect it to though, and Arlen ends up in the company of the dangerous Miami Man (Jason Momoa), an individual who states that he cares about nothing and nobody, save for a little girl named Honey (Jayda Fink). Arlen might be safe again if she can help the man and child be reunited, but helping one person usually means upsetting one or two others. And that's not advisable in such a dangerous place.

The fact that Amirpour went for this as her sophomore feature is admirable and incredible. While A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night enjoyed playing around with the tropes of the vampire movie, The Bad Batch plays within the sandbox of a specific sub-genre without ever being ironic or winking at the audience. This would only take a few tweaks to turn it into a full-blooded Mad Max movie, and there are moments of grisly violence and nastiness that will test even those with very strong stomachs. One scene in particular made me fear for what would happen, and what had happened, to one character, all thanks to the strength of one performance from a woman brilliantly conveying desperation, pain, and fear in her one minute of screentime. It's a real shame that the lead couldn't show even a quarter of that talent.

Having dismissed her before, but also having tried to keep giving her the benefit of the doubt, I am sorry to say that this lacklustre turn from Suki Waterhouse has proven me right in my readiness to avoid any of her acting. This is a film that deserves someone much better in the lead role, and I'm sorry that Amirpour has to see her vision weakened by such major miscasting. One or two moments aside, Waterhouse is dire in this. If you disagree with me, I'd love to hear you nominate one person onscreen who gives a worse performance than her. Momoa is hampered by the accent chosen for his character, but he still manages to do well, thanks largely to the fact that he has the physique and presence to intimidate anyone within a half-mile radius. Fink does well with her relatively small amount of screentime, and it's interesting to see both Jim Carrey and Keanu Reeves in very atypical roles. Giovanni Ribisi is arguably the other main recognisable cast member, but he generally wanders about without much to do, apart from feeling like an alternate-dimension version of his character from Friends.

There are a number of sights here that you're unlikely to forget any time soon. There are also some great tunes scattered throughout the soundtrack. This is a film that comes close to being great on a number of occasions. What holds it back is the mismatch between the more standard genre moments and the really grisly stuff. And Waterhouse. Waterhouse also holds it back, sitting in the middle of everything like an understudy who didn't expect to ever be called up for her big moment in the spotlight. 

6/10

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Shudder Saturday: Seance (2021)

This is on me. Totally. I saw the trailer for this and allowed myself to start feeling optimistic. It looked like an enjoyable horror movie with the emphasis on scares and a spooky atmosphere. That ended up not being the case. What we have is something on a par with a few other horror movies from recent years, a bit of a throwback that doesn't do enough to refresh or twist the tired material.

Suki Waterhouse plays Camille Meadows, a young woman who arrives at the Fairfield Academy. Her arrival comes not long after the death of a student, a death apparently caused by a ritual not a million miles away from the whole "Bloody Mary" thing that many people are familiar with. Quickly making enemies with a particular clique, Camille soon discovers that Fairfield Academy may have a ghost or two wandering the rooms, and someone may want her to reveal what really happened to cause their death.

Written and directed by Simon Barrett, who has previously directed a segment or two for the V/H/S series (and has written some great films, such as You're Next and The Guest, and the oft-forgotten Dead Birds), this is a film that very deliberately chooses to go in one particular direction in the third act, and that direction didn't feel like the right choice for me. That's a real shame, particularly when one or two moments in the first 2/3 of the movie are enjoyably spooky and hinting at a much better movie (the same movie that the trailer seemed to be selling).

Waterhouse isn't a very good lead, although she's not helped by the way her character is written, and none of the other main cast members do enough to stand out. Madisen Beaty, Inanna Sarkis, Ella-Rae Smith, Stephanie Sy, Djouliet Amara, Jade MIchael, and Seamus Patterson are all getting name-checked here because of their screentime, but I'd say that only Sy and Smith come close to making a decent impression, portraying two very different characters that at least don't feel as interchangeable as everyone else in the main group.

I suspect a lot of people will like this much more than I did. It's technically very well done, and I appreciate the fact that Barrett isn't afraid to make use of things like flickering lights and ghostly figures glimpsed ever so briefly alongside some of those flickers, but it feels like Barrett started the film with one approach in mind and then began to doubt himself. He should have had a bit more faith in his own ability to use, and revel in, the ghostly aspect of his plot. Somewhat paradoxically, something so old-fashioned and "creaky" feels fresher and more enjoyable than the familiar third act, which basically turns into a bit of a Scooby-Doo ending (without the fun).

It's not a terrible viewing experience, and does enough in between the dull moments to just about make up for those dull moments, but it's disappointing. Very disappointing. Although it would have been less disappointing if it had been released about twenty years ago, when most of the big supernatural films released went for the same kind of ending.

4/10

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Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019)

The extent of my Pokémon knowledge is very limited. I know that people have "gotta catch 'em all". I know the best way to get Pikachu on a bus . . . poke 'im on. And I know that the mobile game was massively successful, and seemed to be the latest thing that everyone was obsessed with when it was released, for all of a month. I was also vaguely aware of the Detective Pikachu videogame. That's it. So I am not sure if it is a good or bad thing that I enjoyed this movie so much.

Justice Smith plays Tim Goodman, a young man who travels to tidy up some affairs after the death of his father, Harry. He ends up finding a Pikachu that seemed to belong to his father. He can even understand what it is saying, while others only hear sounds like "pika pika". The pair team up to find out what happened to Harry, which leads them to big battles, interrogating a creature that communicates via the medium of mime, and crossing paths with Mewtwo.

I've looked into this (these reviews aren't just slapped together without any care or effort, you know . . . not all the time anyway) and it seems that Pokémon Detective Pikachu is an entertaining movie that manages to satisfy both fans and newcomers alike. There are numerous nods and references scattered throughout every scenes, and the main storyline makes good use of some familiar characters. If you're going to make a movie from this particular brand, this isn't a bad way to go about it.

Smith is a good young lead, and he quickly builds a nice chemistry with his Pikachu (voiced by Ryan Reynolds). The two are a classic mis-matched duo, and Pikachu is nicely realised with some perfect CGI. Having said that, I cannot think of any mis-steps here, on a visual level. Every character is rendered in a way that aligns with their traits (some are a bit more cartoonish, some more realistic) and the production design is often gorgeous. As for the other humans, Bill Nighy and Ken Watanabe lend their not-inconsiderable talents to the proceedings, and it's amusing to watch them have some fun, Kathryn Newton is a plucky investigative journalist, Lucy Stevens, and has great onscreen presence, and you have some fun support from Chris Geere, Suki Waterhouse, Rita Ora, and Karan Soni (the latter two having much less screentime than the others).

Director Rob Letterman also helped to write the screenplay with Dan Hernandez, Benji Samit, and Derek Connolly, from a story also co-created with Nicole Perlman, and this may be his best work yet. His animated movies always felt like second-tier efforts (especially Shark Tale), but his live-action work has been on a steady upward trajectory, from Gulliver's Travels to Goosebumps and now this. 

What could have been a painful cash-in is instead an impressive and amusing detective flick that benefits from the care taken with it, from the writing to the many details tucked away in every scene. Although not a traditional Pokémon story, it manages to treat all of the characters, and the whole universe, with respect. Fans of the series should have a lot of fun with this, and movie fans who don't know much about the games can also have a lot of fun. I THINK it's a very good Pokémon movie, but I KNOW it's a very good movie.

8/10

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Assassination Nation (2018)

Have I ever mentioned how much I dislike the Scissor Sisters? It's not really them that I dislike, they had a couple of hits that were fun and annoyingly catchy, but the way they seemed to be viewed as the pinnacle of naughtiness and wit by middle-aged, middle-class people who viewed leaving their socks on during an unplanned quickie as the ultimate in sexual kinkiness. I know that's an unfair generalisation to make. I also know that I've met far too many people who would seem to be in that category.

I mention that now because Assassination Nation is a film I view as similarly mistaken for cool and edgy, when it is often just desperate and juvenile. It wants to be shocking, clearly, but it's a film that feels tame and out of date already.

Odessa Young is Lily Colson, a young woman living in Salem. She has a boyfriend (Bill Skarsgård), and is also having a lot of fun, to put it one way, with a married man she calls "daddy". Lily starts off as a relieved bystander when a hacker starts to reveal sensitive private information belonging to town residents, but it's not long until she, and most of her friends, becomes a target. Everyone has their secrets, some have more than others. And all of this dirty laundry being washed in public eventually leads to emboldened and angered men becoming abusive, and assholes thinking they should make everything right by punishing those they see as being most immoral and/or causing the situation.

The second feature to be both written and directed by Sam Levinson, Assassination Nation has a few good individual moments. It's just a shame that they are drowned out in the hyperactive mess that makes up the rest of the film. And one of those better moments basically plays out over the end credits. Levinson obviously wants to comment on our modern habits (all of that data that can be out there for every one of us, be it text messages or emails or photos, jumping to the wrong conclusion about something and not listening to reason if it doesn't suit our argument), but he undercuts everything by appearing to run through a checklist of trigger warnings that are provided at the very start of the film. You get a great sequence, for example, of a man trying to explain why pictures of his young daughter in the bath don't make him a pedophile, all while a large crowd is baying for his blood, but you also get a plot point about Lily being fed up with her boyfriend's refusal to go down on her. There's a guy secretly hooking up with someone who is transgender (in scenes that reminded me of Cruel Intentions), the constant threat of being targeted by seemingly-brilliant hackers (see a LOT of movies and TV shows from the past decade, not least of them being Mr. Robot), and an escalation of heated emotions as more and more secrets come out (in scenes that reminded me, oddly enough, of the third act of Needful Things). Assassination Nation is far from original. It's also just a bit silly, certainly by the time it is pushing things even further for the big finale.

Hey, I mistrust the general public, when being coerced into one mass sway of opinion, as much as the next person, but even I couldn't buy into just how quickly things went from 0 to 100 here. The film may be a heightened experience, with everything deliberately ramped up to dangerously excessive levels, but that doesn't make it work any better. I probably would have enjoyed this more as a live piece of theatre, something that really COULD have felt more intense and daring, depending on how uncomfortable the audience was made to feel. As a film, however, it starts to fall apart during the opening scenes.

Young is fine in the role of Colson, and she makes more of an impression than any of her co-stars (with the exception of Hari Nef, and kudos to Levinson for having an actual transgender actress playing someone transgender). Skarsgård adds another toxic male role to his list of them (he does them so well), Colman Domingo is superb in his role as the school principal, and Joel McHale tries, and fails, to overcome the silliness of the script with his performance.

It's made well enough, and the good amongst the bad makes it just about worth your time, but Assassination Nation totally drops the ball. I get what Levinson was aiming for, and there's an argument to be made for the style matching the content, but the most important points are too easily drowned out by the cacophony of irritating excess.

4/10

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