Movie Review: Trap

Posted on by • Posted in Uncategorized • Tagged , , • Leave a comment

The M. Night Shyamalan trend since “The Sixth Sense” (1999) and “Unbreakable” (2000) were released as great movies continue. After hitting his peak with these two movies from 25 years ago, Shyamalan has continued to make mediocre or bad movies ever since. His latest release “Trap” is not only a bad movie, it is amazingly stupid – and could be ranked as the dumbest movie ever made.

The main premise of “Trap” is probably inspired from the success of the recent and hugely popular Taylor Swift world tour, about a serial killer known as “The Butcher”, played by Josh Hartnett who is at a concert of a major female singing star with his daughter and the police know he is at this concert – so they set some kind of undefined trap to catch him. What follows is a series of stupid events, that make no sense. Towards the end of this disaster is a meeting between Cooper, played by Hartnett, and the singer Lady Raven, played by Saleka Shyamalan, the daughter of M. Night Shyamalan – where Raven is by herself talking to Cooper within an isle in this huge stadium and later in a separate room and inexplicably Raven’s entire security team is nowhere to be found. This is the star of a huge concert with over 20 thousand fans and her security team is not anywhere near her. How could such a glaring and obvious error get past the writer and director of this bad movie? What is Shyamalan thinking?

Cooper and Raven eventually wind up at his house with his wife and 2 kids and once again, her security team is nowhere around them. I could not believe that a director and screenwriter who once was as great as Shyamalan could fall this far. The level of illogical stupidity of this story is extremely hard to understand.

It was also hard to understand why Josh Harnett who is attempting a comeback as a movie actor would choose a movie this bad to make his return to movie acting. Hopefully, Hartnett can recover from this bad mistake.

The Rotten Tomatoes critics are way too high 48% with my rating of 10% and a run for your life miss this horrendous and very stupid mess of a film.

Movie Review: Deadpool & Wolverine

Posted on by • Posted in Uncategorized • Tagged , , , • Leave a comment

If someone interviews any number of moviegoers leaving the movie “Deadpool & Wolverine” and asks, “So what was this movie about?” – no one would be able to answer this question. There is no evidence of a movie here, just a series of events, action scenes, fight scenes, time travel, insane explanations, sarcastic dialogue from Deadpool, played by Ryan Reynolds, and non-stop inexplicable inanity. It is hard to understand why the screenwriters and director decided to make a Marvel movie this off-the-wall crazy, with no real plot or screenplay. What is the point of this?

The most important part of making a new Marvel superhero sequel is to create a good enough film, with enough box office so that another one can be made in the future. Recent Marvel releases, including the horrendous, “Madam Web” (2024) and “The Marvels” (2023) are great examples of exactly how not to make a superhero movie. These two very bad films guaranteed that there would never be a sequel, resulting in many millions of potential movie revenue lost. In the case of this new Marvel movie, there were 3 screenwriters, including Ryan Reynolds. It seemed that throughout these two hours, none of the 3 writers knew or even cared what the other writer was creating. These entire two hours were slapped together without any regard or respect for the audience with the ongoing idea that special effects can fix any bad action movie.

The addition of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine might have been an attempt to save the box office for what would have been reviewed as a bad Deadpool sequel, once production money was spent and they realized this was going to be a badly reviewed movie. We have all seen this tactic before with highly marketed movies, where they think they can add bankable stars to the cast to drum up the box office after the bad reviews are released. This movie includes Wesley Snipes as Blade, Jennifer Garner as Electra, and Channing Tatum as a new Marvel character Gambit, who throws playing cards as weapons. Their presence along with Jackman is not enough to fix all that is wrong with this film.

There are a few laughs with the non-stop sarcastic comments from Ryan Reynolds, but not nearly enough to rescue an overly long, boring, and crazy Deadpool sequel.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this movie are a way too high 81%, with my rating 68% only because of some of the action sequences.

Movie Review: Twisters

Posted on by • Posted in Uncategorized • Tagged , , • Leave a comment

The summer blockbuster hit “Twister” was released in May 1996 and had some of the best tornado special effects ever filmed. For many fans of the first film, the new remake “Twisters” will not disappoint as far as the special effects which are as good and in some areas better than the original. I was surprised that while the special effects in this new movie were impressive, considering the advances in technology in the last 28 years I was expecting more spectacular action scenes.

With the increasing number and severity of global warming, this new Twister remake has been expected. This time around, this new film has more science as far as ideas on how to stop a tornado once it starts. Once again “Dorothy”, the flying plastic balls that when released into the funnel cloud send signals that give scientists an idea of how a tornado forms, to better understand these increasingly devastating weather disasters from happening are a minor part of this new film. There was a good amount of science in this story, which is why storm chasers risk their lives chasing these dangerous violent weather phenomena.

While this new movie is a remake of the original it is significantly different enough as far as the story and what happens as well as the characters with two scientists Kate, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, and Tyler played by Glen Powell who are mostly at odds, and then become more than friends later in this story.

There is significantly more death in this remake, especially at the beginning of this movie, where Kate experiences the deaths of several of her friends. Realizing that there are real storm chasers who devote their lives to trying to solve the most dangerous weather conditions in the world, you have to admire the courage it would take to do drive an SUV into a tornado to make a living. The idea this movie proposes to insert chemicals into an active tornado to stop it might be a viable idea in the future, using electric drone SUVS, assuming that such chemicals could ever be created.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this film of 77% is accurate and I give it a solid recommendation mainly for the special effects.