Tag Archives: Chris Pratt

Movie Review: Mercy

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There is a term well known to experienced moviegoers, known as “A January Movie”, where production companies have stored movies that have been marked as either low quality, unlikely to make money, or too bad to even release. January is the time of year when these movies are dumped in movie theaters in an attempt to at least make some of the money back that has already been booked as a financial loss because of a low-quality film idea that just did not work.

The new movie “Mercy” is a great example of a January movie and stars Chris Pratt as police officer Chris Raven and Rebecca Ferguson, who plays an AI Judge named Judge Maddox. In this story, Chris Raven is on trial in front of an AI judge, trying to prove that he is innocent of killing his wife, and he has only 90 minutes. If Raven fails to prove himself innocent, he is immediately put to death.

This entire movie has Chris Raven tied to a chair, sitting in front of Judge Maddox, with hundreds of different videos shown around them in a darkened room. The first thing that you realize is how much money must have been saved producing this film because there is no reason for movie sets or high-quality action scenes – just snippets of low-grade videos. This film was probably greenlighted despite the B-movie script because of a money decision where Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson would make enough box office because the production costs are so low. While the futuristic idea is a good one, with AI taking over the legal system in this country, unfortunately, this screenplay is not up to the task of successfully bringing this idea home.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this movie are a very low and correct 22%. I agree with this rating and rank this movie as a big-time January movie miss.

Movie Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

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With the 3rd installment of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” it is impossible for anyone to not be highly impressed with the science fiction imagination of this film. The new ideas, the space travel, the amazing movie sets, costumes, special effects, unique alien creatures, computer-generated special effects, and stunts are all first-rate throughout. The production budget for this film is 250 million dollars, and it is easy to be very impressed with the work, money, and planning that went into this latest Marvel film. The only issue with this movie, which is extremely common for all action films like this one, is that the script, while not bad, could have been much better.

This story starts with a severe injury to Rocket (the squirrel alien of the group, whose voice is performed by the actor Bradley Cooper). Rocket needs some kind of software injection from some remote planet to save him. After this, the entire story is all about all of his friends trying to get this code from an evil leader who is the captain of a huge spaceship. Much of the story is convoluted throughout different parts of this screenplay and at times can be hard to follow. The humor is pretty much like all of the two previous movies, but I thought the previous films had more frequent and funnier scenes. All of the main characters return for this 3rd film: Chris Pratt, Karen Gillan, Dave Bautista, Zoe Saldana, and Vin Diesel who is the voice of Groot – the tree-like alien – whose only line through all 3 installments is “I am Groot”.

There are several short cameos in this film, from Sylvester Stallone, Nathan Fillion, and Linda Cardellini. I thought Fillion had some of the best scenes among the 3 of them.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this 3rd and possibly last installment of the Guardians of the Galaxy series is a solid 80% and I agree with this rating, but only for the incredible special effects, not the story/screenplay.

Movie Review: Jurassic World Dominion

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There had to be important multi-million dollar discussions about the future of the Jurassic franchise that started in 1993 with some of the most impressive special effects involving living Dinosaurs ever created in movie history. The discussions had to address the main problem with the entire Jurassic franchise. All of these movies are essentially the same. “There is a Dinosaur resort or reserve of some kind, where someone is a criminal or makes a mistake, and Dinosaurs that are supposed to be secured in high-tech cages, escape. Then people run for their lives”. The upside of the new Jurassic movie “Jurassic World Dominion”, is that in the real world, Dinosaurs are move commonplace, mostly not in cages and not released because someone made a mistake or is a criminal. So while admiring the attempt to at least change the constant-same-story-with-people-running-for-their-lives, unfortunately the story and screenplay here is convoluted, mostly boring and way too long.

In this story, there is a major corporation that creates giant grasshopper insects that threaten to destroy the food chain of the entire world. Why this was done, is not fully explained, which is typical of big budget movies I have seen lately. Why explain what we are doing – just show the special effects because nobody will care anyway. This film reunites the original cast, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neil from the first (and best movie in the series) Jurassic Park, released in 1993 and the latest cast that includes Chris Prat and Bryce Dallas Howard, who plays Claire Dearing. Towards the end of this story they all reunite while trying to find Dearing’s daughter played by Isabella Sermon. The reunion of all these actors seems to signify some kind of a symbolic end of this series, even though that we all know that Jurassic will be back in some form in the future. There is just too much money to be made from showing lifelike Dinosaurs trying to kill people.

I thought that the first 3 quarters of this film did not show nearly enough Dinosaurs and Jeff Goldblum’s part was too small, considering he has been the most interesting character in the entire movie series. The two side stories about the major corporation trying to cause world famine for reasons unknown and the kidnapping of Claire Dearing’s daughter for the most part did not work. Once again, the producers of this movie knew that because of the built-in audience, coming up with a great story was not really necessary. The thinking is, all people want to see are the incredible Dinosaurs and people getting killed and running for their lives. The screenplay is always just an afterthought. This is unfortunate, especially when you consider the huge amount of money involved in a movie franchise this important.

The Rotten Tomatoes for this film are an extremely low 33% and due to the bad story and too long convoluted screenplay I mostly agree with this rating and cannot recommend this movie.