Wrath Of Man

Kind of a bummer after the surprisingly light and highly entertaining Nobody.

It's good to see a Guy Ritchie film again, and he commits to telling a very grounded, very serious, very heavy film. Now I respect and admire films of this kind, there's action movie fluff but then there is stuff like Wrath Of Man that just goes full f***ing force off the edge into some heavy shit. The plot follows a security truck driver who has more to his past than he leads on as he thwarts robberies with an ulterior motive in the revenge department. There truly is a lot I can't talk about for the sake of not ruining the movie. Guy really brings his camera work to this picture, and the storytelling aspects jumps around a bit in time but each segment of the film, included with title cards and all, is just as important as the one preceding it and it only gets more dense and involved as it goes along. You can tell there is something there to this security guy named H but even I didn't fully anticipate or grasp who and what he was even after the film told me. It works well with it's reveals, not so much plot twists but how it goes about telling you the backstory of events, the best example of which is the inciting incident that kicks off the film both literally and in terms of H's story. You see it from H's perspective, the security guard's perspective, and the robber's perspective, not once feeling like padding or treading the same waters. The action parts have no stylized or entertaining factors to it, it's treated as seriously as it should, almost in the way war films depict gunfights. It's brutal, unforgiving, has the balls to kill anybody, and while the film has a traditional ending of revenge flicks it doesn't detract from how the rest of the film is presented. It's a different kind of entertainment value but one that should be looked at despite it's serious nature. 3 stars, 7.5/10. New movies incoming next time, so I will see you then.

Pacific Rim Uprising

John Boyega didn't save me.

How did it get worse?! I was walking in with a semi-optimistic view, and I left knowing better than to trust myself. Let's begin. Pacific Rim 2 takes place 10 years after the first, so by my math we are in the early 2020s, following the son of Idris Elba played by John Boyega who is recruited back to train Jaegers when, shock gasp! the kaiju return and he has to clean house. I was so hoping this would redeem the first but it just made it worse! It took the very, very few elements I liked in the first movie and they done fraked it up!! My two favorite characters ruined. One dies, the other turns heel on everybody. Not a good start to win me back after the mess of the first movie! John Boyega couldn't save this movie with his charm and good acting. I don't know what movie has worse characters, probably this one. At least in the first movie there was something there to bitch about, but with this movie there is so little to these characters they might as well not be there. So which is worse, one dimensional characters or characters that have absolutely nothing to take note of? It was like every opportunity they had to make it cool, they just threw away! Oh they got this badass evil mech, it's gonna tear the heroes to pieces! Nope. Oh the mechs get dismembered so they have to rebuild them with parts from the other mechs, sounds cool right? An amalgamation of different robot parts and weapons to create new kickass mechs! No, they just rebuild the ones that were broken. No innovation, no creativity, no thought. And this is the greatest joke of the entire series, well besides the sequel bait at the end. They name the kaiju. Every kaiju in both movies have names. Are you dead sucking ferious right now?? Wow, how did I forget to talk about that last time? How do you name the exact same monster?! They all look the same!! It's not like in Godzilla movies, where you have Jet Jaguar and Mothra! You could not confuse those two! Here? I thought they killed the same kaiju twice! How do you screw this up?! It's giant mechs fighting monsters, do something! Be creative! Be colorful! Be cool! Be (censored) anything!!! I am not reviewing Pacific Rim 3. I refuse. I will quit before such a thing occurs! There was one good thing about going to see this movie. I have a movie theater right down the street from my place, 9 times out of 10 I go to that theater, it's up on top of a hill so I have to climb up to get to the theater and see my movie. I am not making a joke about how the climb was not worth it. After the movie, I started walking down the hill and the skyline was beautiful. That was the only silver lining I could find from seeing this movie. The best thing that came out of that movie was NOT IN THE MOVIE! Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to watch a Godzilla movie and then go into a coma.