The Out-Laws (2023) - Movie Review

Dammit, I knew that getting lucky with Murder Mystery 2 being kind of decent wasn’t going to last. Although honestly, I have some morbid appreciation for this because I didn’t even think they made American comedies like this any more. Both here and for my FilmInk work, I find myself regularly bringing up how modern US comedies seem to spend a lot of time just ad-libbing and riffing instead of actually moving the plot forward or doing anything interesting with the characters. Nowadays, most filmmakers have gotten it into their heads that comedy can help advance a story instead of just grinding it to a halt for little to no reason, but there are some brave little soldiers who are doing their best to keep that style alive.

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 Misfits (2021) - Movie Review

This production is something of a meeting-of-the-minds for two creatives attached to some of the first films I ever reviewed on here. There’s director Renny Harlin, who gave us the raw forgettability of The Legend Of Hercules (and is also the guy who helped kill pirate cinema as a mainstream genre until Jack Sparrow showed up), and then there’s co-writer Kurt Wimmer, who managed to make the Point Break remake even more dated than the original, and who specialises in aggressively style-over-substance action flicks. This review is more a matter of curiosity than anything else, but even knowing their respective histories in the business, I still wasn’t prepared for just how atrocious this team-up would turn out.

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story Of Fire Saga (2020) - Movie Review

Here’s an attempt at timeliness that backfired because COVID doesn’t like any of us having good things. In essence, because this film’s initial release was meant to coincide with the actual Eurovision Song Contest, this now serves as the next best thing to the contest itself. Considering how badly Will Ferrell’s last attempt at European sensibilities went earlier this year with Downhill, I wasn’t expecting much to come from this other than more Ugly American nonsense. And yet, while I freely admit that this film is rougher than it should be, that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Far. Bloody. From it.