Movie Review: The Last Rodeo

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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: Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning

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The good news is that, to ultimately save the life of Tom Cruise and any number of stuntmen who create the most dangerous movie stunts in the history of film, this eighth installment., “Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning” will most likely be the very last Mission Impossible movie. The problem with insane stunts like these is that for each new film, the producers always try to top themselves, and one day, during one mundane take of an action sequence, someone is going to be killed.

This new movie now has the most dangerous stunt scenes ever filmed, including the climax with two biplanes and Tom Cruise wingwalking, and climbing around both airplanes with a high probability of instant death. Some videos about these stunts explain the years of planning and risk involved (included in this blog) as Tom Cruise has once again topped himself, but has put his life in the most extreme danger in this movie.

As far as the rest of this 2-hour and 49-minute action film, there are times when the story is rather slow with a plotline that is overly crazy and complex, about a worldwide AI virus and the series of tasks required to find the source code and then trap the virus to save the world. There are also very dangerous scenes on a submarine where Tom Cruise spends a long period underwater looking for this container that, along with another device, is needed to trap the AI virus that is putting the world on the brink of nuclear war. This part of the action is the most far-fetched, with Tom Cruise at one point without a diving suit very deep in freezing cold water, something that would definitely kill any human being.

The rest of the cast includes the two regulars in this long-running movie franchise, including Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn and Ving Rhames as Luther Stickell, with Hayley Atwell as Grace, and did not include Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust who has been Ethan Hunt’s long-term love interest and was in the last Mission Impossible movie released in 2023. This is because she was killed off in the last movie, something I did not like about the previous Mission: Impossible film. I also thought the ending of this film was too similar to the ending of Mission: Impossible Fallout, released in 2018, and the film was unnecessarily long.

The Rotten Tomatoes reviews for this film are an anemic 80%, mainly due to the overly complex and convoluted plot, with my rating 100% for the incredible action scenes and a solid 85% for this movie.

Movie Review: Final Destination: Bloodlines

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The consensus of the overwhelming number of opinions is that the concept behind the six Final Destination movies is absurd – “death finds revenge on groups of people who cheated, violent death”.

Regardless, no one can argue about the high-quality special effects that show the horrific deaths of many people in these films. One cannot help but be impressed with the ideas and creativity behind the deaths and the chain reaction of events that cause these extremely violent scenes.

The sixth installment of the Final Destination franchise, “Final Destination: Bloodlines”, starts in a high-rise luxury restaurant tower where the overloaded top floor, where people are dancing, starts a series of events that cause the collapse of the building and the horrendous, violent death of everybody in the restaurant. This time around, the premonition that prevents tragedy is different, now recurring in the mind of the great-granddaughter of the woman who saved many lives some fifty years earlier in the high-rise tower.

The rest of this story follows the Final Destination paradigm where death finds revenge (in order) of all the people whose lives were saved, this time around killing all of the descendants of the people whose lives were saved fifty years earlier, because they were not supposed to be born – a new insane addition to the Final Destination story. It is all very stupid, but saved in each movie by the creativity and incredible special effects.

While this is a very good horror movie, the 92% Rotten Tomatoes concensus is a bit too high, with my rating 85% and a recommendation mostly for fans of the six Final Destination movies.