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 Commuter (2018) - Movie Review

The plot: Insurance salesman Michael (Liam Neeson) is taking the train home, same as he has done consistently for the last ten years. However, this trip turns out to be decidedly different as he is approached by a mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga) with a proposition. She tells him that someone on the train doesn’t belong, and he has until the end of the line to figure out who it is. As a reward, he will be given $100,000 once he locates the person and places a tracker on their person. As he considers the proposal, it seems that shadowy forces are about to force his hand, and if he doesn’t do as the woman asked, he could end up losing everything.

The Shallows (2016) - Movie Review

Were shark movies ever cool? I mean, outside of the original Jaws, they only seem to be getting sillier and sillier. Sure, it’s easy to say that now in the post-Sharknado age, but these films been like this for a long time. It’s the ultimate irony that a film that helped define Hollywood as it stands today would also go on to spawn easily one of the most B-movie of the notable B-movie sub-genres.

From the laughable special effects to the hokey acting, right down to the (if you’ll excuse the term) jumping the shark moments like having them be driven by revenge or an exterior need to advertise for Sea World, leaping out of the water to take bites out of airplanes or even grouping together to form tornadoes to attack people, the sub-genre has a pretty prominent reputation for being hilariously ridiculous. Considering all this, making a film nowadays that is meant to make audiences take sharks seriously again is a pretty tall order. So, how does this particular feature turn out in that regard?