Guy Ritchie's The Covenant (2023) - Movie Review

I haven’t been fair to Guy Ritchie. Hell, if we’re being honest, I haven’t been that fair to his ex Madonna either, given how I blamed her for Ritchie’s downturn after Snatch; that shit isn’t cool. And neither is how I’ve been framing Guy Ritchie’s films for as long as I’ve been looking at them on here. Having grown up with Snatch, I had a concrete idea in my mind that that is what Guy Ritchie was good at, viewing pretty much everything else that came after it as him trying to diversify into new areas and stepping out of his reach. While I still stand by some of that criticism of him making films that don’t fit his strengths (e.g. the Aladdin remake), thinking that he absolutely must keep making snarky Brit-hard comedic crime dramas for the rest of his career just isn’t reasonable. And it’s only with his latest that I finally got around to understanding that about the guy.

Strange World (2022) - Movie Review

 

It’s getting to the point where Disney’s animated films seem almost perfunctory compared to their titanic dominance over the film market in just about every other area, from their ownership of 20^th Century Fox, to Marvel movies swallowing entire release schedules whole every time they come out. This film is projected to cost Disney somewhere around $147 million, although with the impending release of Avatar: The Way Of Water, I’m sure the profit there will balance things out again. Ain’t it nice to be a corporate monolith?

Yeah, I’m being snarky here, because I wasn’t really expecting much from this. The last couple Disney Animated films were decent, but nothing all that special compared to the studio’s pedigree, and I’ve come to associate director Don Hall with mid-tier Disney, between Raya And The Last Dragon and Big Hero 6. And on top of that, as much as I kinda like the antagonist-less approach Disney has been taking with their stories for the last few years, the reliance on generational trauma to fill in the gaps is starting to wear thin (they hit their peak with that in Frozen 2, for the record). But, thankfully, I can safely say that this film turned out pretty well, in spite of its obstacles. Although it should be said that ‘safely’ is the operative word here.

The Guilty (2021) - Movie Review

 

 

Okay, I want to give Antoine Fuqua another chance, after how baffling his last production turned out. And as easy as it is to completely write this off as unnecessary because it’s an American remake of a European film (and of a film that I have reviewed previously), I can actually see the merit in remaking this specific feature.

The whole point of the original film was its sound design, with the plot revolving around the lead character being on the phone for the entire run time, so having all that sound be in a language I speak naturally means I can focus more on hearing that sound design rather than divvying up time between that and reading it (yeah, yeah, “lazy Westerners hate subtitles”, so cry the people being a lot more ableist than they realise; save the elitism for another time, 'kay?). There’s also how (and this is admittedly information I didn’t know about when I reviewed the original) the whole idea for this story came from director/co-writer Gustav Möller watching a YouTube video recording of a 911 call. So it’s basically being re-translated back into where it first came from; this could legitimately have a chance at working.