Minions: The Rise Of Gru (2022) - Movie Review

Illumination might be in trouble. While they’ve certainly found their lane with a mixture of old-school animated slapstick and embracing the popularity of villains, their most recent features have been the epitome of diminishing returns. Their take on The Grinch was okay, but not exactly going to replace Jim Carrey anytime soon, the Secret Life Of Pets sequel was closer to a pilot for a TV show than its own film, and Sing 2 showed a noticeable drop from the rousing effect of the original. At this point, it’s easy to argue that the studio should stick with their prime cash cow (the Minions), since their ability to deliver with other franchises isn’t working out… but as their latest has shown, even that is in question.

American Pie Presents: Girls' Rule (2020) - Movie Review

With 2020 being the year of everyone trying to remember any time prior to this one, I guess it makes sense why we’d have a new American Pie movie eight years after the collective shrug of American Wedding. That doesn’t save it from being a highly disposable follow-up made by people who specialise in highly disposable follow-ups (between the director and writers, we got credits for The Scorpion King 4, Honey 2, Blue Crush 2 and Grand-Daddy Day Care), but in a year that has never failed to make zero sense, I’ll cling to what little I can with this because ‘little’ is about all on offer here.

Dora And The Lost City Of Gold (2019) - Movie Review

While most of my cartoon diet as a kid was largely populated by the works of Cartoon Network, Dora The Explorer is something that kept popping up when my after-school hours were taken up largely by old-school Flash gaming. In-between side-scrollers about schoolkid secret agents and motion comics based on Lego properties, I played through a few games featuring one of Nickelodeon’s premium characters and caught a handful of moments from the TV show proper.

Knowing how endlessly goofy the framing for the show is, adapting to the big screen was going to be a challenge for just about any filmmaker. Thankfully, this is an adaptation that manages to work as cinematic spectacle without losing touch of what made the series so long-lasting.

The Ridiculous Six (2015) - Movie Review

I hate Rotten Tomatoes. Despite how it’s widely considered to be a good barometer for how good/bad a film is, it’s surprisingly broken if you actually look at the scores. Some of the reviews that are listed as Fresh or Rotten, if you actually look at even the blurbs on the site itself, are extremely arbitrary, the actual overall score is tucked away underneath the big percentage rate, and said percentage only amounts to how many people liked a film vs. disliked a film. Not how much, just whichever way their opinion falls. For a site that’s meant to help show an overall opinion, being misleading is probably the worst thing you can do. However, with that said, they are especially good in one certain area: The 0%; the films that absolutely no-one defended. Given how this illustrious list includes films like C Me Dance, Fred: The Movie, A Thousand Words and Keith Lemon: The Film, easily some of the worst films I’ve ever seen, that integer still carries a lot of weight. So, what does that say when today’s subject is only one of the three released by Happy Madison Productions to have received a 0%? I mean, that’s means that this is even worse than The Master Of Disguise, That’s My Boy and Paul Blart: Mall Cop, among so many others? Is this truly that bad? Time to, reluctantly, find out.

The Book Of Life (2015) - Movie Review

Guillermo del Toro will always have a spot on my list of favourite filmmakers: Between his equal mastery over artistic ventures like Pan’s Labyrinth and Cronos as well as more popular works like the Hellboy movies and Pacific Rim and his flexibility past the world of cinema with his Strain trilogy of novels and his upcoming team-up with Hideo Kojima on the latest Silent Hill game [2018 Update: Thanks for screwing that one up, Konami], I’d classify him as one of the few creative minds out there that legitimately has something for everyone. It may seem odd that I start this review out like this, since del Toro only produced this, but the man’s influence is such that it can be felt when he’s attached to films in less than obvious roles: Serving as a consultant on Kung Fu Panda 2, Cowboys & Aliens as well as the great cinematic roadblock that is Edge Of Tomorrow, and even though he isn’t directly credited for consultation on films like Puss In Boots and Rise Of The Guardians, there’s definitely some traces of his sense of imagination to be found in all of it. So, with his name pretty much synonymous with quality regardless of his role (Unless we’re talking While She Was Out or last year’s dismal Battle Of The Five Armies), how does this film pan out?