Dragon Rider (2021) - Movie Review

You know you’ve seen too many bad talking animal movies when you start to cherish the ones that are merely passable. Nothing all that special, not all that particularly entertaining, but at least it isn’t a total trainwreck to sit through. That itself is quite surprising, coming from a film that the marketing is desperately trying to convince is on par with How To Train Your Dragon, made by a director whose only past credits are with sideways-glancing nature mockumentaries, and a writer who helped unleash The Queen’s Corgi on an unsuspecting public. And yet, all three of those preconceptions do add up to why this film turns out as purely average as it is.

The Kid Who Would Be King (2019) - Movie Review

Mythology is a funny thing.  The stories that get passed down through the generations, and the heroes and villains that occupy them, almost seem to buck against what we believe to be “truth”. The facticity of folklore has and will likely be argued for as long as we ourselves exist, but the effect that those tales can have on the human consciousness is very much factual. Tales like that of King Arthur, a British ruler and general whose echoed exploits have formed a hefty amount of British culture, not to mention providing the creative arts with some of its most instantly recognisable imagery.

But here's where things get a little trickier when it comes to tales of legend: Not everyone is going to view the legend through the same lens. Where some see Arthur as one in a collection of stories about heroes rising up against a great evil, others see Arthur as an example of nepotism at its worst. The idea that the land can only be ruled by someone who is destined to do so, chosen by otherworldly forces due to their lineage, their culture… their race. And in over the last handful of years, that very idea of only the chosen people being worthy of leading the populace has lead Great Britain down some less-than-ideal roads. And with this latest iteration of the story of Excalibur and its one true wielder, that is brought into the foreground.

The Emoji Movie (2017) - Movie Review

2017 has been an… interesting year so far. In the real world, a series of natural disasters and what appears to be a Twitter-influenced update on the Cold War going on between the U.S. and North Korea has put a lot of worry in people that we are on the brink of destruction. Oh, and some other stuff concerning sexuality just to make everyone seem even more petty than they already are. In situations like this, I and quite a few others would turn to popular entertainment to get away from it all: Movies, TV (or rather Netflix nowadays), video games, literature; whatever gets the mind off things for a little while.

 

Well, in terms of movies at least, that isn’t working all that well either. Over the past couple of months, a series of underperforming releases have resulted in some of the lowest U.S. box office returns on record. If it wasn't for It breaking audience records at the same time, the industry could be in legitimate trouble at this stage. As much as people are quick to jump on whatever hate bandwagon that could even remotely explain this, with everyone from the filmmakers to the critics to the general audiences getting thrown into the crossfire, I’d like to think that there is a far simpler explanation for all this.

 

That explanation, as you may have already guessed, is the subject of today’s review: A film that has gotten legendarily awful reviews, the kind that can secure a release into the annals of all-time bad filmmaking. And I can hardly friggin’ blame them, quite honestly, and you’ll see why as we get into this. This is The Emoji Movie… when this first got announced, I knew this would be a real piece of work, but even that couldn’t have prepared me for this.