Movie Review: Bottoms

Posted on September 8, 2023 by jjcwn • Posted in Uncategorized • Leave a comment

Based on the very high Rotten Tomatoes ratings of 93% for the new movie “Bottoms” and my continued obligation to this blog, I decided to pay 8 dollars to see this movie.

For me, the highlights were that former outstanding running back for the Seattle Seahawks Marshawn Lynch appears in this film as a gym teacher and the great up-and-coming actor and star of the Hulu Series “The Bear” Ayo Edebiri, who plays the main character Josie, are leads in this film. Ayo along with Rachel Sennott as PJ and Ruby Cruz as Hazel decide to create a high school female “fight club”, mainly because they feel like they are the bottom tier disprepected gays of their high school.

There are too many violent scenes in a gymnasium between the women in this fight club, supervised by the gym teacher Mr. G, played by Marshawn Lynch. Of course, this is a kind of a dark, strange, and too weird comedy film, but the violent fight scenes are way over the top, including when one young woman is kicked in the face while she is lying on a floor by a football player. None of this is funny, a parody, or ever necessary in any movie, much less a comedy. All this makes anyone wonder how or why a movie like this could ever be rated highly under any circumstances. For the majority of this film, there was almost no laughing in the audience I was in; always the all time tell tale sign of a comedy that does not work.

Why the critics who publish on Rotten Tomatoes gave a rating of 93%, makes absolutely no sense with my rating only 30% and an emphatic “miss this mess” recommendation.

Movie Review: The Equalizer 3

Posted on September 1, 2023 by jjcwn • Posted in Uncategorized • Tagged Denzel Washington, The Equalizer 3 • Leave a comment

One of the reasons why we go to the movies is because we want to see the world in the eyes of other people. We also like to see good people be happy and succeed, as much as we want to see evil people get what they deserve and in extreme cases, burn in hell. In movie franchises, there has probably never been a more vigorous advocate for defending the good and killing the bad than the character Robert McCall, played by Denzel Washington in the 3 Equalizer movies. For stories like this to work, with violence this extreme, the evil people who are killed must be evil enough in their actions to deserve how they die. Without extreme evil, extreme violence like this would never seem justified.

Of the 3 movies, this 3rd installment has some of the most over the top violence, including McCall at the start of this movie killing one man by shooting his gun through the hole he created in the eye of another man. In terms of imaginative killing, this scene within the first 10 minutes has to be one of the all-time bloody movie scenes to never forget.

Another standout of this movie is that the good people in this small town in Italy are as nice and likable as any people you could ever find in any movie, and the bad people, a gang of murdering criminals within a Mafia gang are as bad as any of the evil people in any of the 3 Equalizer movies. This gang, run by two competing brothers demand payouts from all of the local businesses and if the business owners cannot pay, they are either beaten or their business burned down.

There are several impressive scenes of McCall’s swift reflexes and extreme skills in martial arts that are far above any criminal’s ability to defend themselves. I can only guess that the extreme speed that Denzel demonstrates in these violent scenes is created by speeding up the film because it is hard to believe that anyone can move, injure and kill that quickly.

McCall contacts and then is confronted by a CIA agent, Emma Collins, played by Dakota Fanning
who is the daughter of McCall’s close friends in the last Equalizer movie. In their scenes, the chemistry and acting between Danzel and Dakota are all very well done. The course of this story slowly changes from a suspected terrorist cell to the Mafia group that is really behind the drug traffic in the area.

I was disspointed with the ending, that was the expected violent climax with McCall taking care of business and wiping out the entire Mafia gang, but the action scenes were less imaginative than I would have expected and is probably the cause of the relatively low Rotten Tomatoes of only 73%. This is a rating I agree with and give Equalizer a marginal recommendation – mainly due to the ending that should have been much better.

Movie Review: Retribution

Posted on August 28, 2023 by jjcwn • Posted in Uncategorized • Tagged liam neeson, Mathew Modine, Retribution • 1 Comment

We can only speculate as to why Liam Neeson, who had his last blockbuster hit “Taken” in 2008, and in the last 15 years has been in a revolving door of movie making where he seems to play the same overall character each time. The movies he has made during this period have been either average or below average, around 60 of them. It’s probably no coincidence that this infinite loop of movies started around March 2009, when his wife Natasha Richardson died in a freak skiing accident. It could be that Neeson making movies all year round might be a way of trying to distract himself from what happened to his wife, where she died after a minor fall on a ski slope. A death of a spouse like this, is almost impossible to recover from. We all do what we can to try and move on from tragedy.

This time around with the new movie “Retribution” there are some different and positive features of this film that are moving in the right direction. For one thing, Neeson’s character Matt Turner, spends the entire time sitting in his car, mostly with his 2 children, following the instructions of a terrorist who is threatening to blow up his car. Most of the terrorist scenes are well done, however, the flaw in this story is that the police are convinced by the terrorist and several car explosions that Turner had something to do with what has been going on. Considering that there is a bomb under Turner’s car seat about to explode if he gets out of the car, it would not make sense that Turner set all of this up himself and would include his own children.

There is somewhat of a trick ending when we are shown the terrorist behind these car bombings, that I thought was within an acceptable level of believablilty. I also thought the ending was both satifying and believable as well.

Unfortunately the critics are once again trashing this latest Neeson film, at 30% with the IMDB rating a low 5.5. While this is not a good or a great movie, this is not a film that should be rated 30%. My rating is 70% with a moderate recommendation, mainly for the acting. From all the fans of the great movie Taken, hopefully Neeson will one day make another film that good again.