A Fall From Grace (2020) - Movie Review

Well… since I’m still in isolation, looks like I’ll have to subside my hunger with VOD and streaming. Not entirely sure why I decided to go with this release in particular, but now that I have a better idea in my head about who Tyler Perry even is as a creative, I feel like I can approach this with more certainty than I did A Madea Family Funeral. See, when Tyler actively sets out to make a comedy, his weak-ass sense of character and comedic timing makes the more overwrought, melodramatic aspects shine through more so than the supposed selling point. But when he tries to make a thriller, you start to wonder why he ever had trouble making people laugh.

The Boy Next Door (2015) - Movie Review

Rob Cohen might be one of the best examples of how not to age gracefully when it comes to the more creative fields. I think at some point after making The Skulls, Cohen had a mid-life crisis that he still hasn’t entirely gotten over because every single film he’s made since then reeks of someone desperately trying to relate to “them young people today”. The Fast & The Furious was full of so much posturing that I’m still surprised that it ended up creating a legitimately good action franchise overall, xXx tried (and failed) to show how it was cooler than James Bond, Stealth was just plain stupid, The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor was a CGI-ridden missed opportunity, and Alex Cross made the oh-so-bright decision to cast Madea as a genius criminal investigator; I’ll probably never forgive him for replacing Idris Elba after that crap. It’s already a bad sign whenever someone wants to make an “erotic thriller”, but when that someone is primarily known for overblown action spectacle, the already low chances of success drop even further. Let’s just see how this turned out.

San Andreas (2015) - Movie Review

Even though there are a lot of easy parallels to be drawn between wrestling and any other form of televised fiction, it’s kind of surprising how badly the transition from wrestler to full-fledged actor goes for most people. Usually, it consists of a lot of straight-to-DVD action fodder that still keeps the actors in their ultraviolent comfort zones, with only a handful making it to cinemas and even less of that sample being successful; not every film can be the Expendables, after all. But even with all that in mind, Dwayne Johnson, Actor Formally Known As The Rock, has experienced an track record that is far beyond his peers, The Tooth Fairy notwithstanding.

Ever since I first saw him act proper in the surprisingly good Get Smart remake, I immediately got why this is: He is one of the few that has successfully managed to translate his on-stage charisma to the big screen, using it to sell whatever dialogue and/or premise he is handed. Hell, as bad as The Tooth Fairy was, Dwayne by no means half-arsed it. So, when he was cast as the lead in the latest addition to the natural disaster genre, usually wrought with enough inaccuracies to make anyone question the film’s reality, it came across as ideal casting to help sell the film. But did it ultimately work out? This is San Andreas… and no, as much as I wish he was, Wu Zi Mu is nowhere to be found in this film.