Sisu (2023) - Movie Review

2023 has already seen action cinema reach some amazing heights, from the high-art elevation of John Wick: Chapter 4, to the western shonen sports drama of Creed III, even the one-take shoot-out scene in Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3. So when a film like Sisu comes out, it can’t help but feel slight, even if that is somewhat by design. It is by and large as simple and straight-forward as an action flick gets: Man finds gold, Nazis find man, Nazis try and take gold, man makes them regret it.

It’s a 90-minute feature that is so lean, it’s possible that quite a bit of usable meat was thrown away in the attempt to remove all traces of fat from the cut. But then again, even if it is just a thin excuse to have our stoic action lead cut, shoot, and blow up Nazis for an hour and a half… well, there’s never not a good time for such things, right?

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.