The Mummy (2017) - Movie Review

With Marvel sweeping in box office hit after box office hit, it seems that everyone and their backyard sound stage want to get in on this ‘shared film universe’ trend. Sure, Marvel didn’t exactly invent the idea; filmmakers like John Hughes and Kevin Smith both filled in their films with little threads that tied them together for those willing to pay attention. However, those guys did it more in passing than anything else, whereas Marvel has officially turned it into a new blossoming branch of the Hollywood franchise system. From DC’s attempts to match their graphic novel rivals to Legendary Studio’s increasingly-promising big monster franchise, even individuals like M. Night Shyamalan who seems to be setting up his own comic book-inspired world off the back of Split, this is basically the big new thing in Hollywood right now.

 

So, naturally, it seems that Universal Pictures wants to get in on this trend as well, using today’s film as a springboard for a shared universe based on their classic cavalcade of movie monsters. Of course, if the rest of the entries in the Dark Universe series are anything resembling this, we may be in for a very bumpy ride over the next several years because this film is something truly special.

Inferno (2016) - Movie Review

Growing up as I did when the big debacle concerning The Da Vinci Code made headlines, I’ve probably got the same mental association with Dan Brown films as the rest of the world: Convoluted mystery stories justified by a business-casual approach to history. Of course, I’ve spent the years since first watching Da Vinci and Angels & Demons playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed, so fidelity to history and genuine science clearly isn’t an entertainment factor for me… most days, at least. As such, I don’t take as much issue with these films as the general consensus. Sure, they fall into some pretty illogical pitfalls with alarming regularity, and main character Robert Langdon can shift erratically from smartest man in the room to worst investigator ever, but as a couple of potboiler mystery thrillers, they serve their purpose. Yes, I realise how long I’ve spent lambasting Akiva Goldsman’s work, but the Dan Brown adaptations are easily some of his most tolerable contributions. Since Akiva has stepped away from the typewriter for this one, there’s nowhere to go but up for this series… maybe?

Mortdecai (2015) - Movie Review

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more versatile actor working today than Johnny Depp. Yeah, he’ll have a couple of auto-pilot roles like in The Tourist with Angelina Jolie, but when he’s on-point he can transform himself on screen: Jack Sparrow, Edward Scissorhands, Willy Wonka, Ed Wood, even Guy Lapointe; say what you will about the quality of the writing for each of these roles, and it is varied between them no doubt, but these alone show the kind of range that some actors would give all their Golden Globes to get. But even the best of actors can appear in duds; how does he follow up his spellbindingly bizarre performance as Lapointe in Tusk?