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Showing posts with the label epic

AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR - REVIEW

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Review available on the new website .

FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST - REVIEW

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Based on the popular anime series, Fullmetal Alchemist is a 2017 live-action adaptation from Japan following Alchemist brothers Elric and Alphonse as they encounter a range of powerful enemies and search for the Philosopher's Stone. The film was recently released on Netflix. We first meet the two brothers as children when an alchemy experiment aiming to bring their dead mother back to life goes wrong. Cut to years later and we learn that Alphonse's body somehow vanished after the botched experiment and he now inhabits a knight's empty armour indefinitely, hence the nickname "Fullmetal Alchemist". Unless Elric, who has himself lost limbs, can somehow recover the Philosopher's Stone, he might not be able to ever summon his brother's body back. A big action sequence early on depicts the brothers fighting against a man whom, they believe, is using the Stone nefariously and the scene boasts some big CGI effects, something the film fails to match before it

KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD - REVIEW

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After re-imagining Sherlock Holmes his own way, Guy Ritchie recently turned his attention to the Arthurian legends and delivered  King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword . Due to a ridiculous budget that didn't translate to much on screen, the film was a box-office flop and was mostly panned critically. The film opens with a scene in which Uther Pendragon (Eric Bana) takes on giant elephants in an over-the-top sequence that would fit quite well in a Lord Of The Rings movie. This could set the tone for a proudly ridiculous, action-packed epic but, while it is indeed shamelessly silly, it's not exactly the thrilling actioner you'd expect. Parts of the film are over-stylised, bloated and full of giant CGI creatures, other parts feel bare and not unlike a relatively low-budget effort like Centurion or an Uwe Boll movie. But it's the sub-par writing that really prevents this King Arthur film from being the fun roller-coaster ride it wanted to be. The masterful  Excalibur

WHY IS THE LAST JEDI SO DIVISIVE?

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I talk about the "controversy" surrounding Star Wars: The Last Jedi .

STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI - REVIEW

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Review available on the new website .

AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR - TRAILER

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Avengers... re-assembled! Seriously, is this trailer awesome or what??

DUNKIRK - VLOG 14/08/17

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I talk briefly about Christopher Nolan's latest: Dunkirk .

1941 - REVIEW

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Following the runaway success of both Jaws and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind , Steven Spielberg directed war-themed comedy 1941 back in 1979 and, although it wasn't technically a box-office bomb, it wasn't exactly a hit and it's only years later that it gained a cult following. The film is very loosely based on a mix of real yet mostly disconnected events as it explores the growing paranoia post-Pearl Harbor with US citizens fearing that Japan would attempt another attack and dealing with it in various ways. As an enemy submarine slowly tries to make its way to Los Angeles with the unlikely goal of destroying Hollywood, chaos builds in the city and we follow a variety of characters, each of them doing their own thing, with everything culminating in a cartoonish battle around Santa Monica pier. This is very much an ensemble piece in the vein of Dr Strangelove or American Graffiti with some characters having a very clear goal and others just kind of wandering i

KONG: SKULL ISLAND - REVIEW

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With cinematic superhero crossover universes currently competing, so too it looks like monster universes are about to fight it out with The Mummy possibly being the first of a modern Universal Monsters reboot franchise and Godzilla facing Kong in an upcoming sequel. Kong: Skull Island introduces us to the mighty King Kong in a prequel of sorts where a group approved by the US government travels to the evasive Skull Island with a military escort in the 1970's. Don't expect Kong to get chained up and brought back to New York City where he climbs up the Empire State Building etc. in this one. There are some clever nods to these familiar events throughout the film but it's mercifully not just a straight-up retread and, stylistically, it is very different than Peter Jackson's King Kong from 2005. Kong: Skull Island owes a lot more to the likes of Apocalypse Now , Predators and the more over-the-top classic Kong sequels than the 1933 original or any remake. The ea

THE LAST SAMURAI - REVIEW

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Back in 2003, Tom Cruise starred in Edward Zwick's The Last Samurai , a film chronicling the fall of the samurai at the hands of a tactical collaboration between an increasingly modern Japanese government, its Emperor and the US. If you can get past the idea of Tom Cruise as a samurai and the fact that this is basically Dances With Wolves in a different setting, then The Last Samurai is actually a very good film. Cruise plays disillusioned, alcoholic former US Army Captain Nathan Algren, who is haunted by the memories of massacres involving Native American civilians, as he is hired to help train the Japanese army. He reluctantly agrees to travel to Japan and teach the Japanese soldiers how to use modern weaponry but he is captured after an impromptu battle against the samurai and is brought back to a village where he gets to know Ken Watanabe's Lord Mastumoto, the leader of the samurai rebellion, and learns the ways of the samurai. Realising how much of an underdog the sa

ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY - VLOG 05/01/17

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I put on my best Christmas sweater and talk Rogue One: A Star Wars Story .

IN THE NAME OF THE KING - REVIEW

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Uwe Boll directs this loose video game-to-movie adaptation of the Dungeon Siege series, spending a whopping $60M on it making it the director's most expensive flop to date. The film stars Jason Statham as a farmer amusingly called "Farmer" whose farm, along with most of the kingdom, is one day invaded by demonic knights controlled by sorcerer Gallian (Ray Liotta) who is working with the King's (played by Burt Reynolds) slimy nephew Duke Fallow (an over-the-top Matthew Lillard) in an attempt to overthrow King Konreid. Farmer joins forces with his friend Norick (Ron Perlman) to try and save his wife and child and get to the bottom of this whole mess using his trusty boomerang. Don't ask. While the film boasts some decent visual effects here and there, its ambitions of emulating the Lord Of The Rings trilogy (John Rhys-Davies even has a role) falls resoundingly short as, not only is the story needlessly convoluted and really not all that interesting but th

OUTCAST - REVIEW

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Outcast is one of those Nicolas Cage movies which looks like such a half-assed effort it could only be entertaining. The casting of Hayden Christensen as his co-star and yet another ghastly-looking, misleading poster covered in fire being further proof of this. It also seems odd that Cage would take on yet another Crusader flick so soon after Season Of The Witch but heck, why not? It's not like it's an overdone subgenre. Besides, Season Of The Witch was more of a fantasy film and Outcast is like a Zhang Yimou epic minus the budget, the battle scenes or the talent. The plot follows a Chinese prince and his sister, who escape when the prince's warrior brother kills the King. They meet a Crusader-turned-drunk (Christensen) and he helps them take back the throne. On the way (read: an hour into the movie), they meet an old pal of Christensen's (Cage) who also deserted the Crusades. Of course, everyone in China speaks perfect English all the time, even to each other,

"WEIRD AL" YANKOVIC: THE SAGA BEGINS

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Well it's Star Wars Month (duh!) and since there's never a bad time to revisit this little gem, here we go!

NOAH - REVIEW

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Darren Aronofsky may have sadly skipped on making The Wolverine some years ago but he is back, this time with a blockbuster Bible movie of all things and after the success of Black Swan , this could have either backfired wildly or made a huge impact. Noah , though, rests somewhere in between. On the one hand, here is one of the best Bible-themed movies of the past 20 years with Russell Crowe proving to be the perfect choice for Noah and Aronofsky bringing an otherworldly feel to the whole thing. On the other hand, the film runs out of steam somewhat once the much talked-about flood actually happens. Story-telling wise, this movie really finds the right tone, going for a swords and sorcery-style fantasy approach rather than a this-all-really-happened type of preachiness and earnestness. You've got angel rock monsters, Anthony Hopkins as Methuselah showing off the odd wizard-like powers and... um, did I mention the rock monsters? The film's first half is batshit insane an

PACIFIC RIM - REVIEW

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You'd think something as simple as big robots and big monsters would be super easy to get right in a movie, but with the likes of the Transformers trilogy and 1998's Godzilla in its back catalogue, that kind of flick badly needed a makeover. Good thing Guillermo Del Toro knows roughly what he's doing! Yes, Pacific Rim is the Hellboy director's take on monster movies and big robot movies: the result? A decidedly fun, brainless mesh of anime-style melodrama, epic nonsense, cartoonish lols and  Robot Jox -type live-action 80's goofiness. It's very retro, very silly but very cool. It's one of those movies you can't take too seriously and demands that you sit down, suspend your disbelief quite a bit and enjoy yourself. Nitpicking Pacific Rim would really be missing the point. Now the reason that some pan the Transformers movies, me included, is that their flaws really are completely distracting and do affect the style the films themselves are going

THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN - REVIEW

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Terry Gilliam rarely gets to go all-out creatively anymore and that's a real shame because, for a while there, it seemed as if no project was too nutty for him to handle. Oh who am I kidding? Every single one of his projects is nutty. Hence why financing them must be so daunting! The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen was a huge flop but so many masterpieces were, from  Night Of The Hunter to Blade Runner . You can't judge a film's quality based on how much money it made, you just can't. Gilliam's film is one I've always considered to be a masterpiece of the fantasy genre. Its epic scale, its surreal visuals, its playful anarchism, I just loved every minute of it as a kid, even if by the end I had no idea what the hell I had just watched. It was an adventure like no other and I was completely taken with all these larger-than-life characters and their crazy odyssey. One second you were inside a volcano speaking to Roman gods, the next you were playing card

THE EXPENDABLES 2 - REVIEW

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Putting such a crazy-epic cast together should really be enough to make a good movie. And yet the past has shown that no matter how many famous faces you cram into a flick, it's just not sufficient. Remember the original Casino Royale ? Yeah, that had Peter Sellers, Woody Allen and Orson Welles: terrible. Mars Attacks! had a crazy-big cast but that was a good, fun movie. The Expendables , however, was not. The first movie really was a missed opportunity to say the least. You had a cast that included Stallone, Statham, Rourke, Lundgren, Jet friggin' Li and yet what we got was an instantly forgettable mess. Now with The Expendables 2 we've got more Arnie, more Bruce Willis, a good bunch of newcomers (Van Damme, Norris), how could that movie be anything BUT awesomeness itself? Well, frankly I have no idea but this sequel certainly isn't "awesomeness itself". That said, I gotta admit it is better than the first film in that it at least gives us a dece

PROMETHEUS - REVIEW

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As I'm aware that Ridley Scott's latest sci-fi blockbuster isn't yet out in the US, I'll try to keep this review spoiler-free so the coast is clear. During my review of Scott's Robin Hood , I ranted the following: "Some directors are great at one thing in particular. Some are very versatile. Scott thinks he belongs to the latter category when really he's part of the former. Ever since his sci-fi/fantasy days (Alien, Blade Runner, Legend) he has avoided those genres like the plague focusing instead on Russell Crowe-led bore-fests like A Good Year or, indeed, Robin Hood" And here we are, several years later with Ridley Scott's sci-fi comeback which finally comes following some truly masterful marketing and several kickass, mouth-watering trailers. Big budget, big cast, big story: surely this is the comeback I was waiting for! Well, yes and no. On the one hand Prometheus is exactly what I wanted: Scott doing what h

13 ASSASSINS - REVIEW

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The prospect of bonkers director Takashi Miike directing a Seven Samurai -style samurai flick seemed like one awesome idea. Like Tarantino making a gratuitous war comedy/thriller or Takeshi Kitano taking on the blind swordsman himself! So has Akira Kurosawa been bettered? Not quite, but 13 Assassins is certainly right up there! In the first half of the film, Miike takes the time to introduce Goro Inagaki's antagonist: a guy pretty much as delightfully evil as it gets. A mad, cruel, heartless serial killer, you can't wait for Koji Yakusho's assassins to get rid of him. The titular assassins are introduced one after the other brilliantly in the fashion of the Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven: it's a classic build-up complete with montage, emotional conflicts and power speeches! Then, in the second half of the film, the assassins' plan goes into practice and soon enough they take over a village where the main battle takes place. Without spoiling it, let me ju