You can’t get further away from Aquaman as this one.

Dry, post apocalyptic desert all around, Jason Momoa (our future DCEU King of Atlantis) and a little girl (Jayda Fink) traverse the dangers of the Mad Max-lite world in the new film by Ana Lily Amirpour.

The movie also follows the misadventures of Arlen (Suki Waterhouse), a girl who wound up in the desert, cast out from society into this desert wasteland.  Arlen is captured and has her arm and leg amputated for food.  Yes, the people in this desert have become cannibals to survive.  She is able to escape and finds herself into a group of people who provide her with a false leg so she can get around.

After recovering, Arlen set out to gain some vengeance on the people who cut off her appendages, shoots a woman, and winds up with the little girl known as Honey.  However, Honey winds up with the Dream (Keanu Reeves) in his small cult-like Utopia.  Arlen meets Momoa, gets taken away, and heads through a psychedelic world to find Honey again, for…you know.. reasons.

The story unfolds sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowly.  The first hour or so of the movie was remarkably dull and had very minimal dialogue.  Honestly, I am not sure much about what happened or why some of these people did what they did.  I understood why they resorted to cannibalism.  Other than that, most of the motives in this movie were enigmatic.

There was a Hermit (played by Jim Carrey) and his purpose is a complete mystery.  He is silent throughout and he pops up randomly a couple of times to provide… um… comedic relief?  Not really sure.  The effects on Carrey were top notch.

The film should also reveal how selfish our two main protagonists are, thinking more about what they want and need instead of the needs of Honey.  The final scene drives that home with a somewhat cold brutality.

I’m really not sure what I watched.  Perhaps this is meant to be a new take on the genre, but the shocks were few and far between and the rest was nonsensical.  Momoa reminded me of WWE wrestler Roman Reigns every time the camera stopped on him and his lack of connection to anyone or anything made me not give one fig about his character.  I didn’t care about any of these characters and that made this excursion into the Bad Batch very dull.

I did become hungry for spaghetti.

1.8 stars

Based on a graphic novel, Woody Harrelson plays Wilson, a grumpy, lonely, middle aged man who misses his ex-wife. Complaining about everything, Wilson rediscovers his ex-wife, only to find out that he had a teenage daughter that he never knew he had.

Woody Harrelson is well cast as the neurotic Wilson, odd and obnoxious.  Though he is the type of person who can get on your last nerve, there is something about the likable loser that is sentimental.  In the hands of a lesser actor, the character of Wilson could really be off-putting, but Woody Harrelson plays it well.

The story itself never really connects completely.  It jumps from scene to scene with minimal connective tissue.

That connection is Wilson.  He initially starts with the dog, Pepper.  Then, he goes to find his ex-wife Pippi (Laura Dern).  Then he convinces Pippi to stalk the daughter that she put up for adoption, Claire (Isabella Amara).  Wilson goes to jail.  Wilson tries to adapt to the outside world after prison.  He hooks up with the dog sitter.

All of these moments are strung together haphazardly but much of it works because of Woody Harrelson.

The scenes with Wilson and Claire were sweet, but they ended too quickly.  The film, which had seemed to focus on the parent-child relationship, switched gears again.

All of the things that Wilson goes through seem to have low stakes for the character most of the time which makes the movie weaker.  Wilson could have been a considerably more deep story of this curmudgeon and his struggles to get through the rest of the world.  Instead the movie chooses the sentimental path.

That is not a bad thing, but it certainly changes the tone of the film.

Woody Harrelson is good in this movie and it was funny and sweet.  It is worth the time it took to watch it.  I just see what could have been a really strong movie hidden among the sentimentality.

3 stars

What a piece of crap this movie is.

Seriously, I hated this film.

Explosion.  Yell.  Explosion.  Yell.  Explosion.  Explosion.  Crappy dialogue.  Awkward joke that is not funny.  Explosion.

The film was a frenetic mess, from start to finish.  There were so many jokes that were being cracked, but none of them were funny.  There were not any laughs.  It was so loaded full of garbage and crap.

I am not going into detail on plot, because, honestly, I am not sure what that plot was.  It was painfully convoluted and did not focus on the Transformers.

The film started off in King Arthur times and showed the knights and Arthur hoping that Merlin can pull out the last minute help.  This was about as much positive as I can get.  I was interested.  And then Merlin started speaking, and suddenly it felt like a Monty Python skit.  Merlin was shown as a joke, who was drunk and …ugh.  It lost me at that point.

So maybe Optimus Prime, one of the greatest characters of all time, can pull the film out of the downward spiral, right?  Wrong.  Optimus Prime is in the film for, perhaps, 15 minutes, tops.  Megatron is in even less.

The film is not about the Transformers.  It is about the human characters.  Plus, there are so many characters that are crammed into this film, and many of them are unnecessary.  The young girl, Izabella (Isabela Moner), who one of the trailers focused on, is there for a while at the beginning and showed up at the end, but was gone for a good hour + in the middle.  And she has no real reason to be involved in the story.

Another character… is the character played by Anthony Hopkins.  I hated this character.  He was obnoxious and idiotic.  He is one of the great actors in movies, but he was terrible here.  It was possible that he was having fun, because he did have a smirk throughout the film.  I’m glad he had fun, because I did not have any fun watching it.

When we do see the Transformers, they do look good.  The special effects of the movie is one of the strengths of the film.  One of my previous criticism of other Transformers movies was that I had trouble telling the different Transformers apart.  That is not as much of a problem this time as, especially the Autobots, were distinctive enough with their designs and their color patterns that I could tell the difference with the others besides just Optimus and Bumblebee.  The Decepticons, however, were pretty interchangeable with their designs.

I have heard that some people liked the action involved in the Last Knight, but I found it dull and repetitive.  It was the same kind of stuff from every Transformers movie.  That is one of the big issues with these films… there simply is no originality.  We have seen everything before, and you can only see so many things blow up before it gets boring. The slow motion is annoying too.  There are so many of the typical Michael Bay, the director of all five Transformers movies, tropes found here that it can anger someone.

After about an hour and a half, I was thinking that the film had to be over soon… however, I then thought, wait… Optimus Prime has yet to reach earth from Cybertron.  That thought really depressed me.  I was ready for this film to be over ten minutes into it.  The whole Merlin bit just destroyed any potential hope I might have had of finally finding that Transformer movie that is good.  The Last Knight is not the one.  It is one of the worst movies of the year so far.

0.6 stars

I have never been a rap fan, but the biopic Straight Outta Compton was well done and entertaining, so the next biopic from the time, on the enigmatic figure Tupac Shakur, must be equally engaging, right?

No so much.

To be fair, I did not hate All Eyez on Me, but the biopic was distinctly flawed and played like a basic cable movie with considerably worse language.

The film looks at the life of rap prophet Tupac Shakur, from his early days in New York City as the step son of a Black Panther to his days as a gangster rapper under the label of Death Row Records.

Tupac is played by Demetrius Shipp Jr., who has an uncanny resemblance with Tupac, and who brings an innocence to the role that was unexpected.  Fact is, Shipp seemed to portray Tupac as always in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I have a suspicion that it was not quite as coincidental as the film make you believe, and the film suffers by trying to make Tupac look .  Still, Shipp is one of the stronger parts of the movie.

I also could not believe that Michonne was here playing Tupac’s mother.  Danai Gurira, who plays Michonne on the Walking Dead and will be in the Marvel Studios Black Panther movie next year, does a fine job as Afeni Shakur, the revolutionary turned drug addict mother of the rapper.  The fact that I did not recognize her as Michonne until late in the film speaks to how effective she was in the role.

The film is just too long.  At 2 hours and 20 some minutes, All Eyez on Me felt longer.  It had some pacing issues, where many of the scenes felt like they were included to make sure that certain boxes of Tupac’s life were checked.  There were many scenes that could have used more of an analysis, diving into the whys and the hows.  Because of that, the film has a disjointed air about it.

One of the most interesting aspects of the life of Tupac was, unfortunately, his death at 25 years old.  Shot while in the car of his partner Suge Knight (Dominic L. Santana), Tupac lingered for several days.  The murder had never been solved.  This is an area that I would have liked to have seen more in this biopic.  You could still have dealt with the rest of Tupac’s life, but by flashback, interweaving it with the questions that was brought up.  Everyone knew what the end of this film would be, so instead of taking the safe route and just going through his life, why not be like Tupac and take some storytelling risks?

I also must say that I did not like hearing the “n-word” as much as I did.  I do not understand why the African-American community uses the word in their own conversations.  Of course, I am not black and I have no right to criticize, but the word has such a hatred to it, I wish it was not used as it is.  Sure, the word is used in real life and certainly during the time period that this film took place, and it makes the film more realistic, but I just wish it was not as prevalent as it is.

It is too bad that this is not a deeper look at an individual who is still idolized to this day for the voice that he had as a rapper and poet.  Despite some decent performances, I think All Eyez on Me missed the opportunity to really look at something creative and culturally important.

2.5 stars

Cars would not be my favorite Pixar franchise.  I thought Cars was okay, but nothing special and Cars 2 was tremendously terrible.  So I approached the third installment in this series with a lack of interest.

It was fine.

There is no doubt that this is considerably better than Cars 2.  The film returned to focus its attention on Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and also returned to the world of racing, instead of trying to jam Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) into a heist movie.

Cars 3 features an aging Lightning McQueen, trying to stave off the oncoming might of a new wave of young and technologically superior racers.  Unfortunately, Lightning has a terrible wreck and it puts his future into question.

Changing this to an underdog story fits this franchise much better than the previous one did, and the limiting of Mater to a few short scenes was, most likely, a bright move.

Instead, we see Lightning trying to retrain to return and recapture the glory of his past.  He fins a new sponsor (Nathan Fillion), a new trainer Cruz (Cristela Alonzo) and a new purpose.  However, the new way of training was not having the desire effect, so Lightning needed to look into the past to finds his new inspiration for the future.

Cars 3 is definitely formulaic. There is nothing in the story that we haven’t seen before.  In fact, if you were to compare it, the story compares very closely to several Rocky movies (in particular Rocky 3).  Although this type of formulaic storytelling is common for many animated films, Pixar movies are generally held to a higher standard.  Cars 3 does feel like the laziest of the Pixar movies.

The first part of the film is unexceptional, if not dull.  The film really starts to pick up when Lightning and Cruz go out to the beach to start their “unconventional” training.  There is a sequence with Lightning and Cruz at  a demolition derby that is probably the strongest sequence in the film.

The final race was both predicable and a bait-and-switch that I did not like much.  Without spoiling too much, there was a scene earlier in the film where we see an old race featuring Doc Hudson and I knew exactly how that film would factor into the finale… or at least, I knew somewhat, because there is a change that happened that kind of made me roll my eyes and made me question the legality of the situation.  I thought the ending was weak.

The animation is tremendous, and certainly is on par with the best of Pixar.  The cars themselves as well as the background at the racing tracks and the environments are beautiful once again.

There is a lacking of real emotion that usually is included in Pixar animations, but there is a nice message of believing in yourself and not giving up and parts of the film are reasonably entertaining.  This is no The Incredibles 2, but Cars 3 is better than Cars 2.

3 stars

My friend Chris suggested that I send my intern to see Rough Night and skip it myself.  That was Chris’s suggestion for Chips also.  Boy was he right about Chips.  That thing was a steaming pile.  However, I did not hate Rough Night.  I would even go as far as to say that I kind of liked it.  (By the way, I do not have an intern… it was just a joke.)

Jess (Scarlett Johansson) is going to get married so she is going to have a bachelorette party with her college friends, organized by her “best” friend Alice (Jillian Bell).  The four college friends also included former flames Frankie (Ilana Glazer) and Blair (Zoë Kravitz) and, despite Alice’s objections, the weekend also included Jess’ friend from Austrailia, Pippa (Kate McKinnon).

Alice planned a weekend of debauchery and drug use and, although reluctantly at first, Jess and the others joined in.  When the women ordered a stripper, the night took a distinct turn for the worse.  The stripper turned up and is accidentally killed, leaving the five women to question what they could do.

I will say right away that the trailers for this film did not interest me much because they focused on the “party girl” aspect of the film.  It made the film look like a big drug-fueled, party film and those types of movies rarely interests me.  And that was what the first 25-30 minutes of this movie was like and I could feel myself checking out.

Then the stripper died, and things became considerably better.  The film became darker, the comedy became funnier, and the pace picked up dramatically.  I found myself enjoying much of the remainder of Rough Night.

I also thought that this would be too much like “Weekend at Bernie’s,” and, though there is some of that as well, it did not dominate the film.  The second part of this film is like “Weekend at Bernie’s” crossed with “Very Bad Things.”

The cast is definitely a strong point.  Scarlett Johannson is great as the straight-and-narrow, “I’m running for public office” Jess.  Later in the film, she is able to break out some Black Widow moves as well.  Kate McKinnon is spot on as the Vegemite-loving Aussie.  Jillian Bell does go over the top too much and the jealousy she showed toward McKinnon was too cliched.  Bell’s character seems to resemble a character that might be played by Rebel Wilson.

The film kept flashing back to Jess’s fiance Peter (Paul W. Downs), who had received a weird phone call from Jess and was worried that she wanted to break up with him.  I enjoyed these scenes with the uncharacteristic Peter almost as much as the main characters.  I believed that the time spent with Peter really improved the humor of the movie.

Now, the story needed to be better.  It felt too much like a network sitcom with some penis jokes.  The premise, however, works fine, but the story itself unravels as the film progresses.  There are too many predictable aspects to the plot, and I think this could have been a really great comedy with better writing, because the cast is tremendous and they all work extremely well together.  I believed that these five women would do anything for each other.

I have said before that a comedy that makes me laugh can cover up other flaws in the film, and, once the stripper died, Rough Night made me laugh.  The chemistry with the women was great and I enjoyed the flashes to the fiance and his desperation.  On the whole, this could have been better, but really I expected it to be worse.

3.2 stars

I do like me some shark movies.  I love Jaws.  I enjoyed The Shallows.  I even like the Sharknado series when it is being roasted by the RiffTrax guys.  So 47 Meters Down felt like it was heading into a nice niche in my viewing ballpark.

However, I disliked the movie quite a bit.

Lisa (Mandy Moore) and Kate (Claire Holt) are sisters and vacationing in Mexico after Kate broke up with her boyfriend.  In order to show the boyfriend that Kate was not “boring,” the girls, who had hooked up with a couple of men in a bar, decide to go scuba diving in a shark cage.  Unfortunately for the sisters, something went wrong and the cage broke free from the boat and they wound up on the ocean floor, 47 meters below the surface of the water.  And… sharks.

There were several problems I had with 47 Meters Down.  The biggest reason was that I had no reason to care about either of these women.  They were very sparsely developed cardboard cut outs of people.  In Jaws, we spend a lot of time getting to know Brody, Hooper and Quint.  We even get quite a bit of development of the Blake Lively character in The Shallows.  These two girls felt as if they were nothing but disposable horror movie characters.  The remainder of the supporting characters are nothing.  There was some potential for these men involved with the girls being something more than just two men, and the captain of the boat could have been a fascinating character (and they even teased it a bit), but there was nothing done with him.

There were also a lot of dumb things done in the film.  That is not uncommon for many film, especially those kind of films that depend on fear or suspense to grip the audience.  Horror movies are some of the worse offenders of this trope.  And these two characters do some really dumb things during the movie.

There was serious problems with the time passage here, because the film uses the air tanks running out of oxygen as a way to create tension in the audience, but I did not understand why the air was being used so quickly.  It seemed as if it was supposed to be a longer period of time than what we saw on screen.  They talked about how being hysterical would use up air, but the girl who was in more control of her emotions actually lost the oxygen first.  It made little sense.

Another pick was an argument used to get Kate to agree to go into the cage, something she was not looking forward to doing, was that she could make her ex-boyfriend jealous with the pictures they took.  Yet, the girls did not bring a camera.  They had to borrow the camera of the guys they were with.  Yeah, nice planning ladies.  SPOILERS…And when they invariably lose the camera, it gets swallowed by a shark in one of the moments that caused me to laugh out loud.  End of SPOILERS

To be fair, some of the shots beneath the ocean were tremendous, and the presences of these massive sharks are always intense.  During these moments, 47 Meters Down is its strongest.  There is some suspense created as the sharks swim past the cage and you see these giant creatures.  They just seem to become too comical when doing their actual attacks.  This shark also comes out of nowhere multiple times.  I wonder if the shark can teleport, because you would think that you would know when a 20-foot shark was coming up on you.  The shark turned into a series of jump scares and that took me out of the movie.

And the ending… well, I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I disliked it a lot.  I’ll leave it there for now.

There are a few moments in this film that create a feeling of claustrophobia, but the characters are flimsy, despite the actresses being reasonably solid, the dialogue is weak and the choices made are laughable.  I was checked out several times thinking about things like how sound waves travel through water instead of being engaged in 47 Meters Down.  It feels like a wasted opportunity to do something engaging.

2 stars

I came across this film looking at the new releases on Netflix on a lazy Sunday afternoon and thought it might be an interesting story to add to the queue.

Netflix has become a top of the line service for binging original television programs or putting on classic movies that you haven’t seen in a while.  However, there have not been as many really successful original movies on the streaming service.  I certainly am not counting the days between Adam Sandler movies.

However, this one looked intriguing and different, so I thought I would give it a chance.  And honestly, I was not sure what was going on and I did not find myself too involved.  Then, the story took a turn and I found myself having to go back and rewatch the first couple of acts.

The hook of the film is that the story is being told in reverse order.  It starts on a Friday, where we see Andy (Rainn Wilson) sneaking into his house’s basement to secretly see his little daughter.  Andy was on the run for his involvement in a bank robbery that led to his brother, Sheriff Zeke Sikes (Benjamin Walker) being shot and hundreds of thousands of dollars being stolen.

Zeke is shown trying to piece together what had happened with the help of his deputy (Adam Pally) and a couple of FBI agents (Ron Livingston, Rob Corddry).

Then the narrative flashes back and we see what was happening on Thursday.  The story continues to take us back a day until we saw exactly what had happened at the aforementioned bank robbery.

I have to say, the format of Shimmer Lake was a creative use of narrative that you rarely see, and the use of it here really created a well done mystery of what exactly had happened.  Watching it back for a second time with the knowledge, you can see how they set up what was to be revealed in a very clever and entertaining way.  Sure there have been other examples of this type of story telling, but there have not been that many to make it cliche.  And, I really did enjoy the way the third act unfolded.

Now, to be fair, I was not as interested in the film until I reached that third act, so there might be some question about the overall quality.  Still, when viewed as a whole, I thought Shimmer Lake was an effective film and certainly an enjoyable watch on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

3 stars

This was one of those films that I was not sure I wanted to see.  I have never been a big fan of the use of dogs in film to exploit the cheap emotional reactions.  A Dog’s Purpose springs to mind immediately, and the trailers made me think that Megan Leavey would fall right into the same camp.

However, I must say, that I did enjoy this movie way more than I thought I was going to and I am glad that I ended up attending it.

Megan Leavey is based on the true story of a New York woman who joined the Marines to get away from a bad home life, and wound up bonding with a bomb-sniffing German shepherd named Rex.   Rex had become known as a violent dog, going as far as, with a bite, breaking six bones in his most recent handler’s hand.  Megan and Rex, however, connected and became war heroes by saving many lives in Iraq.

Some of the scenes in Iraq were the best of the movie.  Watching how these dogs would perform their tasks, out in front of the actual armed military, sniffing for bombs planted in the area was extremely impressive.  These K9 units are amazing with what they are able to accomplish and it is not out of line to call these dogs heroes.

Although the film focused on the central relationship between Rex and Megan, it also developed quite a bit about Megan’s life before the dog and after the dog.  We meet Megan’s family, and we get to see a relationship with a fellow dog handler.  All of these moments helped to create the character of Megan Leavey.  Yes, I think sometimes the display of the character of Megan was inconsistent, skipping some aspects of the development.  At times some of the character development felt rushed.

Despite that, the story the film tells is one of heroism and how a positive connection can change someone’s life for the better.  It just happened that this transformative relationship in the film was between a woman and her dog.

Kate Mara does an admirable job as Megan Leavey, showing us the troubled back story as well as the powerful after effects brought on by the dangers of war.  Some of the better scenes in the film were the ones after Megan returned from the war and was separated from her friend Rex.  Tom Felton does great as a marine trainer named Andrew and Bradley Whitford is almost unrecognizable as Megan’s father Bob.  I remember thinking that I really enjoyed that character’s performance and, when I saw the name Bradley Whitford in the credits, I understood why.  He never gives a bad performance.  Common is also strong here as Megan’s marine boss Gunny Martin.

The film might be a touch too long, but I am not sure what I would leave out.

Though much of the film does a good job providing narrative to Megan’s life, the main crux of the film is the relationship between Megan and Rex, and this is where the film rises above other films like this.  The emotional beats felt real, not forced upon us like in some other films (e.g. A Dog’s Purpose, and they show the bond between woman and dog.  It is very believable and, at times, inspiring.

I did not think I wanted to see Megan Leavey, but I am sure glad I did.

3.9 stars

This will be a challenging review to write.  As I am sitting here, I am still not really sure how I feel about It Comes at Night, the new horror/psychological thriller film starring Joel Edgerton.  So perhaps writing this review will be cathartic in a way.

The film is set in the near future where, apparently, some virus has spread across the world and has led to many people dying.  However, the post-apocalyptic world is not mentioned much and there are no details/specifics about this virus.  All we know is Joel Edgerton plays Paul, whose wife Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) live with him in isolation in the woods, following all kinds of specific rules to avoid getting sick.

Then one day, a stranger breaks into their house, believing it to be deserted, looking for water.  Paul captures him and debates whether to kill him or let him go.  The stranger, Will (Christopher Abbott), tells Paul that he has a wife and son as well, and he did not intend to cause them any problems.  This only serves to enhance the struggle about what to do with Will.  In the end, Paul and Sarah decide to ask Will and his family to come and live with them, thinking that together we would all be stronger.

However, one of the biggest issues this film investigates is that of paranoia.  There are a ton of little hints that could paint a picture of Will being not exactly what he claims to be.  Or… are these all red herrings that only serve to grow that paranoia in the mind of Paul?

I will say that there are not many “answers” to these questions given in the film, and some people may not like that about the film.  For example, when Will was first being questioned, he said that he and his family had stayed with his brother.  Later, in a conversation with Paul, Will claimed that he was an only child.  When queried about the “brother,” Will said that it was actually his wife’s brother and they were like brothers.  It made sense, but it is only included as a way to throw doubt into the character of Will. Things like that do not bother me. I have never been one who needed to have every little thing laid out in front of me, with every question answered, but this movie did not spend any time on revealing what was going on.  Some might find it annoying.

The performances were great.  Joel Edgerton has been on quite a roll lately, but the true scene stealer of this film was Kelvin Harrison Jr.  Seventeen-year old Travis had most of the meatiest scenes and he pulled them off wonderfully.  He had several emotional dream sequences as well as being the most developed of the characters.

The tone of the film is definitely claustrophobic, since we really do not know what was going on.  There was a feeling of imminent danger at all times, especially at the night time hours, and yet it felt as if something could show up to reveal that none of what we thought was going on was really going on.

This is a character-driven film that does not rely on plot to move the story along.  The plot is very sparse in many areas.  It dives into the psychological aspects of this situation much more and depends on the characters personal interactions.  These feel like good people that wind up doing things that they may not have planned on doing.

There are a lot of solid work in this film, directed by Trey Edward Schults.  There are great shots in the film, and it creates a natural tension without the constant tropes of the horror genre.  It is a very personal and smaller story set in a world that could have provided a large scale drama.  The story is about trust and protecting one’s family from threats, not about some mysterious monster causing all the problems.  That is where the true horror comes from.

3.75 stars

Since we had a Marvel Cinematic Universe with a series of interconnected movies all taking place in the same world, many other movie studios have tried to copy the success of Marvel Studios.  So far, the studios have not yet had the success of Marvel. That, however, does not mean that they are not going to keep trying.  The latest cinematic universe to launch into theaters is the Universal Monsters Cinematic Universe, recently dubbed The Dark Universe.  The first film in the Dark Universe is the rebooted The Mummy, starring big time movie star, Tom Cruise.

Unfortunately, this film is no figurative Iron Man (the film that kicked off the MCU)

Tom Cruise plays Nick Morton, a soldier/antiquities dealer/grave robber, who is after the next big score which he finds out is in Iraq.  He has stolen a map to a mysterious tomb of an Egyptian woman who was mummified because she was so evil.  Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) is the evil woman who we hear all about in the long expository writing in the film’s first ten-fifteen minutes.  After finding the tomb, Nick inadvertently brings back the woman in her mummy form, with all the supernatural powers that goes with that, and somehow becomes cursed.

The story is pretty lackluster and is missing some real key elements.  Mainly, the movie goes from being a movie about a mummy to a movie setting up a universe that at times features a mummy.  It is very obvious that they are doing world building as a cinematic universe needs.  The problem is they did not bother to make a good movie.

Not to say that everything about The Mummy was bad.  Tom Cruise was his normal solid self.  We get out share of crazy Tom Cruise action pieces and stunts and we get more than our share of seeing Tom Cruise run.  Sofia Boutella was good as the mummy in what they gave her to do.  There is some solid, if not excellent, CGI and special effects.

The biggest problem I saw with The Mummy was that the film did not know what it wanted to be so it tried to do it all.  It tried to be a horror movie and had some jump scares.  It tried to set up the world of the Dark Universe so it gave us Easter eggs of other monsters.  It tried to be funny and quippy, and it told jokes that really were not funny.  It tried to recapture the tone of the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies so it tried to be an action/adventure film.  The mummies in this movie were really zombies so it had some Walking Dead flavor to it as well.  Since it tried all these things, it never got around to knowing what it should have been… a monster movie.

The tone of the film really suffered from its lack of identity.

I did enjoy the “Nick Fury” of the film in Russell Crowe.  Crowe plays Dr. Henry Jekyll and we do get a flash of Mr. Hyde.  He was somewhat interesting, but he did not fit into the film that they were trying to do.  He will most likely be that connective tissue to bring all of the Universal monsters together, much as Nick Fury did for the MCU (or perhaps, like Phil Coulson did).

Another issue here was the romantic coupling of Tom Cruise’s character with Annabelle Wallis, who plays Jenny.  Jenny is the stereotypical damsel in distress, despite beginning the film with hope that she would be more than that.  I never once believed that Nick and Jenny gave two craps about each other and the connection between the two of them is vital in where the narrative (as it is) goes.  I did not understand why Nick, who is shown to be a bit of a jerk, has any feelings for Jenny.  Because of the lack of connection to eac other, what happens in the movie’s third act can only be explained as happening because the script says it does.  There is no real emotional connection there.

Then, the ending of the film has zero resolution.  It is so obviously setting up the next film in the franchise that it is fairly annoying.

Having said all that, there is some dumb fun to be had with The Mummy.  If you want to go to the theater for a dumb summer movie, you could do worse.  Lower your expectation, shut off your brain and you might have some fun with the Mummy.

2.5 stars

Captain Underpants is certainly designed for kids.  I think that kids would enjoy this more than I did.

I was actually pretty bored by this.

In fact, I might have slept through parts of it.

George (Kevin Hart) and Harold (Thomas Middleditch) are two troublemakers at an elementary school who have been tormenting the principal Mr. Krupp (Ed Helms) for years.  They have also been writing and drawing comics of the super hero Captain Underpants.  When the boys are finally caught red handed during one of their pranks, Mr. Krupp prepared to split the boys into different classes in order to destroy their friendship.

Facing the threat of losing their friendship, George and Harold somehow hypnotize Mr. Krupp into thinking he is the aforementioned Captain Underpants.  Water brings Krupp out of his hypnosis and the snap of the fingers brings him back.

The arrival of Professor Poopypants (yes, that is what his name was) provides the boys and Captain Underpants with a new foil to battle.

Okay, let’s start with this.  I really enjoyed the animation, specifically the variety of animation that was in this film.  There was a section where the animation switched to a flip book style.  There was a sock puppet section.  It gave the film a distinct feel that is unlike most of the animated films around today.

I also enjoyed the fourth wall breaking of the film.  George and Harold spoke to the audience as if they are in on the joke.  The banter between Kevin Hart and Thomas Middleditch is strong and funny.  The friendship is believable and their chemistry is obvious.

The film ends with a new theme song by “Weird Al” Yankovic, which was an awesome surprise.

Now, I have already said that I found this pretty boring except for these items.  The story was not engaging.  The jokes were very juvenile and full of poop and fart jokes.  There was a lot of repetition with the switching of Captain Underpants’s personalities.  Though it has some humor, it is not anywhere near as clever as what it thinks it is.

Kids should enjoy this very much, and in that way, it has done its job.  However, I snoozed through much of it and was happy when Weird Al started singing at the end.

2.5 stars