Movie Review: The Last Rodeo

Posted on May 24, 2025 by jjcwn • Posted in Uncategorized • Tagged Neal McDonough, The Last Rodeo • Leave a comment

The new movie “The Last Rodeo” is about bull riding in the United States. From a search on ChatGPT, about the hazards of this sport in the United States:

With injury rates of 1440 per 1000 hours, bull riding is 10 times more dangerous than American Football and 13 times more dangerous than Hockey. These injuries include Contusions, Concussions, Shoulder, and Knee with 1-3 deaths annually. Most of these injuries happen during dismounts or when riders are thrown off and subsequently trampled or gored. Considering the insane popularity of watching someone ride a bucking horse or a bull, and the injuries, it is very hard to believe that Bull Riding is a viable sport anywhere in the world.

This story is about a long-retired bull rider, Joe Wainwright, played by Neal McDonough, who almost died from a riding accident many years earlier. Joe’s grandson Cody Wainwright, played by Graham Harvey, is gravely ill with a brain tumor and he then decides to enter a bull-riding contest to win money to pay for the complex brain surgery to save his Grandson’s life.

Joe reunites with an old friend Charlie Williams, played by Mykelti Williamson, whom he had not seen since his wife died many years earlier. The friendship between these two men is one of the best parts of this movie. At first, it looked like Joe would compete in the over-50 bull riding contest, but for reasons never explained, he winds up competing in the headline bull riding contest, where the prize money is 750,000 dollars.

The other good part about this story is the relationship between Joe’s daughter, Sally Wainwright, played by Sarah Jones, which is about the anger Sarah feels towards Joe and his decision to ride again, and what she had to go through when he was almost killed the last time he rode a bull.

The outrage over medical costs in this country and insurance companies, in this story paying only 40% of the total cost of life-saving surgery for a 10-year-old boy, has been a major backstory for many movies over the years, addressing the insanity of medical costs in the United States. With the high probability that this reality will never improve due to the years and criminal abuse that has existed for decades within the medical insurance industry.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for The Last Rodeo are a low 73%, mainly because there is nothing new or original in this story, with my rating a solid 75% and a moderate recommendation, due to the acting and the importance of the medical aspect of this story.

Movie Review: Fight or Flight

Posted on May 10, 2025 by jjcwn • Posted in Uncategorized • Tagged Fight or Flight, Josh Hartnett • Leave a comment

The only obvious difference between the nonstop-seen-this-before action movie “Flight or Fight” is that all violent fights and action occur on a plane, with the additional insanity of a final fight scene that involves a chainsaw, even though there is no way a chainsaw would be allowed on a plane like this.

Fight or Flight stars Josh Hartnett as Lucas Reyes, an FBI agent on the bench, who is mostly sleeping and drunk in Thailand for two years, when he is called up to track down a criminal on a plane. About the time Reyes is about to board the flight, his team at the FBI realizes that just about everybody on the plane is a hired killer, setting the stage for nonstop fight and action scenes for the rest of the movie, without any regard to a coherent story.

The other issue with a movie like this is that with the beatings, stabbings, and shootings that Reyes takes during the many fight scenes, he would have died midway through this film. There is never any real reason to throw logic this far out the window, just to make an action movie.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Fight and Flight are a too high 77%, with my rating around 50% and a solid miss.

Movie Review: The Surfer

Posted on May 3, 2025 by jjcwn • Posted in Uncategorized • Tagged Nicolas Cage, The Surfer • Leave a comment

Another one of those, “quality means nothing, story means nothing, let’s be strange, weird, never been done before”.

This time, the movie is called “The Surfer,” starring Nicolas Cage as “The Surfer”, somewhere on the coast of Australia, about to surf with his son and running into a group of lowlife local Australian surfers. Then a series of events that involve theft, bullying, and intense violence, leaving The Surfer battered, dirty, and looking like a homeless man. While watching this too-long, depressing movie, you can’t help but think. Why doesn’t he just drive away? Why does he stay in this parking lot overlooking a beach that is loaded with criminals who might kill him?

What is so strange about this film is that The Surfer spends almost this entire movie hanging out, sleeping in his car in a parking lot, on his cell phone trying to get the funding for a house he wants to buy on the coast, calling his boss, trying to save his job, in a downward spiral into homelessness and depression for this entire two hours. What is the point of all this?

Aside from all these problems, the majority of this movie makes no sense and eventually degrades into constant attempts to trick the audience, wondering what is real, what is fake, and what is just a hallucination. Is this man now really homeless, imagining all that happened before? Is all this happening because he has been in the sun too long, or is he on drugs or just drunk? One hour into this and it is impossible to care about what is going on, we just want it all to end.

I have never seen a greater difference of opinion on Rotten Tomatoes, with the critics giving this bad movie an 86% rating, and the audience 50%. What are the critics thinking here? Perhaps they are all on the same drugs that The Surfer is using in this film? This time around, the critics are once again dead wrong, with the audience correct at 50%, and a run for your life, miss this movie at all costs.