Black Adam (2022) - Movie Review

As much as my growing disappointment with quite a few films that 2022 has had to offer may argue against this, I like to think of myself as the ‘last line of defence’ of film critics. Over the past eight years of writing on this blog, as well as my commissions for FilmInk, I have always tried to find the positives in whatever film I watch. It doesn’t always work out that way, but I genuinely think that I have yet to watch a film that has literally zero merit to it. If a new film has come out, and it has been either disregarded or just lambasted by other critics, chances are good that I have at least one good thing to say about it, if not several.

That goes double for superhero films. While I get the inherent problems with how much of a stranglehold the genre has on the industry nowadays, I personally can’t find it in myself to lambast the art as a result of that. I love superhero stories. When they’re done well, they can make for just the right kind of storytelling that tap into that part of me that holds onto the ideals of goodness within humanity like a life preserver. I may not want every film to be like that, and indeed not every film should, but I usually have a lot of nice words for the ones I come across.

To put it simply, in order for a superhero film to get on my bad side, it has to be a particularly crap example of the genre. I mean, I was able to unironically vibe with parts of Morbius, just to show how lenient I can be with this kind of fare. But then I come across stuff like this, which feel like they exist solely to validate every single criticism that has been levelled at the genre and its effect on the industry over the past decade and a half.

The Invisible Man (2020) - Movie Review

The Universal Monsters. A stable of cinematic creatures that served as the progenitor for the modern craze surrounding cinematic universes, which itself has found repeated non-success in the post-MCU landscape. Dracula Untold was retrofitted to be part of the ‘Dark Universe’, and the results are unsurprisingly rushed, and the less said about the Tom Cruise vanity project (well, more so than any of his others, at least) The Mummy from 2017, the better. Hell, even before then with the works of Stephen Sommers in the 2000’s, attempts to bring back the classic monsters kept shooting themselves in the foot as far as trying to create serialised franchises out of them.

But now that Universal has stopped putting the cart before the horse, and are letting individual films stand on their own for a change, we have the latest attempt to bring back the old guard. And holy shit, this is easily the best attempt yet.

What Men Want (2019) - Movie Review

Situations like this are why I’m not as staunchly anti-remake as most others. What Women Want is an awful movie, the kind of attempt at gender analysis that does everyone a disservice and finds that lovely middle ground between hating men and hating women in equal measure. It’s really sad to think that the idea of casting Mel Gibson as the lead in a romantic comedy isn’t even in the top 10 worst decisions that went into making that pile of utter garbage.

But at the same time, the concept at its heart about being able to read the minds of the opposite sex is something that has potential for something that isn’t painful to sit through. So naturally, when this remake was announced, I admit to being a bit sceptical at first… but then I watched the original in full and realised that there’s nowhere to go but up with this story. And thankfully, this film actually does that.