The Space Between Us, as of this writing, has a 15% on Rotten Tomatoes.  There is no reason this film should be that low on the movie metric site.  Of course, I can understand why.  I am not going to recommend this film either, but I did not find it to be a bad movie.  It was just one that had its share of problems and an unreached potential.

Set in the near future, a group of astronauts are on their way to set up East Texas, the first colony on Mars.  Led by Sarah Eliot (Janet Montgomery), the crew successfully left earth’s atmosphere on the way to the red planet.  However, there was a problem.  As it turned out, Sarah was pregnant.  They could not turn the ship around and return so the decision by East Texas backer Nathaniel Shepherd  (Gary Oldman) was to cover up the pregnancy and let Sarah give birth on Mars.

The decision is a tragic one as Sarah dies in childbirth.  Flash forward sixteen years, we meet Gardner Eliot (Asa Butterfield), raised by scientists- especially Kendra Wyndham (Karla Gugino), he has become a capable young teen who wished for nothing more than to go to earth.  His body, which had been affected by the different atmosphere of Mars, would not be able to withstand earth’s gravity.

Meanwhile, Gardner connected with a girl on earth via the computer (some kind of interplanetary Skype) he nicknamed Tulsa (Britt Robertson), a troubled teen in a foster home, and he formed a bond with her.  He told her he had a disease and was confined to a penthouse in New York.

A medical breakthrough gave Gardner a chance to have an operation that might allow him to survive on earth.  Desperate to take the chance to see Tulsa and to find his mysterious father, Gardner agrees to the surgery.

With the surgery a success, Gardner heads off Mars and toward the home world of his mother, a world he had never stepped foot upon.

Asa Butterfield and Britt Robertson was, by far, the best parts of this movie.  They were fun and engaging and had a solid chemistry.  The only reason this film did not devolve into a slushfest was because of these two actors.  Sure the story was cheesy and hard to believe, but the young actors sold it to the best of their abilities.  Unfortunately, their romance seemed to be rushed and was not given the proper time to grow the way it should.

There are several issues with the film, though.  My biggest gripe is that the film is not consistent in the world that they are using for the setting.  At times, the world is shown to be technically ahead of the times (such as a scene where a car is driving automatically while Gary Oldman slept behind the wheel) and other times it feels as if there is not one shred of difference between this world and the one on the screen.  The movie seems to want to have it both ways and that makes it feel unbalanced.

The trip across country by these two kids and their seemingly amazing ability to steal cars and swipe internet service really stretched the reaches of credibility.  There is a silly scene with an airplane that is tough to buy even before they land it and crash it.  The resulting explosion belonged on an old episode of The A-Team.  There is no way that small single engine crop duster would wind up exploding after driving into the barn like it did unless there was a massive meth lab in that barn.  Silliness like this really took away from what the film was trying to do.

The Space Between Us could have been a really great film, but it switched out a potentially interesting science fiction story for a run of the mill Nicholas Sparks love fest.  Gary Oldman’s character was both predictable and wasted in a background story chasing the kids, screaming at Gardner, much like Jack did at Kate on LOST, that he had to go back!

I did not hate this movie, but I should have loved it.  I did not.  It was, at best, okay.  It does not deserve 14% on Rotten Tomatoes, but 40-50% would be reasonable.  It is not a “fresh” movie.  Asa Butterfield was charming, but charming was not enough here.

2.5 stars

Yes, she was Leeloo.

Milla Jovovich was in The Fifth Element and was a fantastic fresh face as the actual Fifth Element who, along with Bruce Willis, saved the world from an ancient evil.

Unfortunately, Milla Jovovich is also Alice, the kick ass female lead of the Resident Evil series, a franchise directed by her husband Paul W.S. Anderson.  I had never seen any of these films before so I came into Resident Evil: The Final Chapter a blank slate.  I had low expectations and I was hoping that the film could exceed them.

It didn’t.

This was a terrible film.  My not having seen any previous Resident Evil movies was not a problem as the film spends about the first ten minutes giving us a refresher course on the back story.  Thanks for not making me go back and watch those.  I appreciate it.

After that, we had a series of action sequences strung together for and hour and a half.  That was basically it.  There was a slight plot which is expressed more in the final twenty minutes (not kidding) than at any point of the film.

Apparently, the big evil group Umbrella, who was responsible for the release of the T-virus, which turned most of humanity into zombie creatures, also created an airborne cure for the virus.  They stored this in the Hive and Alice, when tipped off by the Red Queen (Ever Anderson), the computer generated composite of the young Alice, goes to find the cure.  There is also a contrived time limit that apparently was all the time the remaining humans on the earth had left before they were completely wiped out.

Along the way to the Hive, Alice met some extremely disposable characters, who wind up being disposed, and the decidedly not dead Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen), who tortures Alice by having her run behind a Humvee/tank as the zombie horde followed behind (never quite catching up).

Now, it is possible to turn off your mind and enjoy a film like this for what it should be… a big, stupid, fun action film.  The problem here is that there is nothing fun here.  The action scenes are among the worst action scenes put on film.  They have so much shaky cam work involved here that it is practically impossible to know what is going on.  I did not see this is IMAX 3D and I am forever grateful because I can’t imagine that these action scenes wouldn’t have given me a massive headache.  As they were, they were unwatchable.

The CGI is atrocious.  It felt like it came out of the early nineties instead of 2016.  There is an early scene with a dragon that is particularly bad, but it is far from the only example that could be given.

The acting was bad as well.  Milla Jovovich is fine as Alice, but some of the other characters in the film feel like the cousin of the director.

Plot contrivances.  Bad CGI.  Unwatchable action scenes.  Weak acting among disposable characters that we have no connection to.  Oh, I didn’t mention the MASSIVE overuse of jump scares.  I started playing a game of trying to predict the next jump scare.  It was pretty easy since the music would go quiet and then something would jump out.  I would guess that there were more jump scares here than the last five horror movies I have seen.  All this adds up to a terrible movie that is, Hopefully, the end of the franchise.

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is bad.  Just bad.

0.75 stars

Don’t see this garbage.

And January is just about over.  Thank goodness!

Sitting through A Dog’s Purpose, I felt one major thing…manipulated.

I mean…how many times do you have to kill that poor dog?

In what was intended to be a heartfelt and loving connection between human and dog turned out to be not much more than an empty attempt to prey upon the emotions of dog lovers everywhere with little else in the story.

Add to that the fact that the potentially best part of the story was completely spoiled by the trailers that it lost all of its wallop.  The idea that Bailey (the dog) was being reincarnated again and again only to find his original owner Ethan (played in three generations by Bryce Gheisar, K.J. Apa and Dennis Quaid) was revealed in the trailer that has been airing for the last six months (or so it seemed).  We see all of the important scenes with Dennis Quaid in that trailer making everything that happened at the end of this movie…1. boring since we knew it already and 2. spoiled.  The film does take time to build the relationship between Ethan and Bailey and more of a surprise reunion might have been more emotionally enjoyable.

And…how many times did they have to kill that dog?  The reason I keep going back to that is that since we knew that Bailey would wind up back with Ethan from the trailer, these middle stories all felt unimportant and carried little weight for the movie as a whole.  It was just an excuse to try and get the audience to cry over the death of this dog that we knew would be coming back to life anyway.  As I said, manipulative.

There are some entertaining moments in the film, but there is just little substance to any of it.  Josh Gad provided the narration of Bailey’s (and other dog’s) thoughts in the different reincarnations and, apparently, can remember across those timelines.  Gad has some good lines, but delivers most of his dialogue in a flat tone.

Another problem was the rules of what the dog could understand was inconsistent.  Sometimes the dog did not know what the humans were talking about and the other times the dog knew exactly what they were talking about.  The reason??? You know, plot.  This is played several times for just humor but I did notice the inconsistency several times.

There is also a ridiculously sacchariny story involving Ethan and a high school sweetheart (first played by Britt Robinson and later by Twin Peaks’ Norma, Peggy Lipton) that turns out predictably and unrealistically.  Nothing that a reincarnated dog couldn’t pull off, though.

Without taking the controversy of the animal abuse from the set into account, A Dog’s Purpose was a substandard, manipulative tearjerker that probably will hit some emotional chords to dog lovers.  When you add in the reported abuse caught on camera of the German Shepard being forced into the water for a stunt despite clearly being afraid to do it, A Dog’s Life becomes more than manipulative.  Instead, it becomes cruel.  Look at the TMZ footage yourself if you want to see it, but it clearly shows a dog that does not want to be in that water being forced in.  That footage will forever taint this film.

However, I saw the movie before seeing the footage so my review is only of the film.  A Dog’s Purpose, which was adapted from a best selling novel by W. Bruce Cameron, is too manipulative to stand and the story is too wishy-washy to stomach.

2 stars

Michael Keaton has had himself quite a renaissance of a career.  With Birdman, Spotlight and soon to be Spider-man: Homecoming, Keaton is one of Hollywood’s best stars.  Keaton is at it again in this story of the creation and expansion of McDonald’s.

Ray Kroc (Keaton) was a small time salesman with a penchant for pushing junk who came across a small time burger stand in San Bernadino, California that provided quality food service without the lengthy wait.

The stand was made and run by brothers Mac (John Carroll Lynch) and Dick (Nick Offerman) McDonald.  They showed Ray around behind the counter and told him the whole story of how this came about.  The McDonald Brothers did not know what was going to happen.

Ray saw this as a huge opportunity to take McDonald’s nationwide by franchising it.  Mac and Dick were less than enthusiastic about the thought.  Ray had to drag them along.  When they officially agreed to expand, Mac and Dick had Ray sign a contract that they believed would keep the decision making progress in their own hands.

They did not understand how persistent Ray Kroc would be.

Or ruthless.

Ray did what he believed was best for the restaurant and for his own bottom line, whether that meant cutting out the McDonald brothers or dumping his lonely and ignored wife Ethel (Laura Dern).  Ray also claimed many of the ideas from the McDonald brothers as his own, including the concept of the golden arches.

Keaton was great as this character who was really not a very likeable protagonist.  You could understand why Ray did what he did, but the way he treated the McDonald brothers was anything but decent.  John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman were extremely fantastic in this film.  They were quirky and likeable and carried the early scenes of this movie.  The story about the creation of their McDonald’s was engaging and entertaining.  Because they were so likeable, the eventual screw job that they suffered was made all the more emotional.

The film might have dragged a little bit in the middle and could have used some more tightening in the editing department, but otherwise, I enjoyed the Founder.  Michael Keaton was wonderful again on his path of making great acting choices.  The film was full of great performances and revealed a story that I was unaware about with the tale of how McDonald’s became an American institution.

3.85 stars

Perhaps M. Night Shyamalan has really found his way back.

The story of M. Night Shyamalan is almost as interesting as any of his movies.  He started out with some of the greatest films made such as The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs.  People were calling him the next Spielberg.  Then, he seemingly lost it as he started to make pretentious films, banking on his penchant for having “twists” at the end.  Films such as The Village and Lady of the Lake dropped his stock.  Then, he made some of the most truly awful films ever made such as The Last Airbender, Devil, The Happening, After Earth (a film where they did not even put his name on it).  He went from the next big thing to the punchline of a joke in just a few years.

After Split, Shyamalan has had his second straight film that was pretty good (following The Visit) and perhaps he has righted the ship after all.

Split tells the story of three girls who get abducted by a man (James McAvoy) who has D.I.D. (dissociative identity disorder).  We discover through his interactions with his therapist Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley) that “Kevin” has 23 distinct personalities.  More than that, Dr. Fletcher is convinced that the D.I.D. patient might have special abilities specific only to that personality.  She talks about the people who have D.I.D. might be the next evolution of the human race.  That was a fascinating concept and it does pay off in the movie.

However, she has no idea that personality Dennis has abducted the girls and has been having discussions with personality Patricia (including rapid fire clothing changes).  Among the girls, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) is our main protagonist.  She is a loner and a depressed teenager, but she handles the situation of the abduction so much better than the other two girls that you knew something was up.  We see some flashbacks to her childhood with her father (Sebastion Arcelus) and her uncle (Brad William Henke) and we understand why Casey is the way that she is and why she reacts to this situation in such a different way than the other two girls.   Anya Taylor-Joy was another highlight of the film for me.

Casey is able to connect with another personality, Hedwig, who is like a nine year old boy. Hedwig is able to take control of the body (they call it “coming into the light”) any time he wanted.  Casey tries to get Hedwig to let her go, but he is afraid of what Dennis and Patricia will do.  They have brought these girls here as a sacrifice for “The Beast,” which we know little about but we believe may be a 24th personality.

James McAvoy is utterly brilliant as this character.  He plays each personality distinctly differently and you can see how different they are.  He shows you the innocence of Hedwig and the manipulative nature of Patricia.  But McAvoy does not just play this guy as a villain as you can see in the almost sweet relationship that he has with Dr. Fletcher.  There is a kindness when talking with her and he really believes that she can help him.  Unfortunately, Dennis and Patricia seem to have become the stronger alters.

There is a lot of tension in the story, but I have to admit that without the unexpected “reveal/twist” at the end of the movie, Split would have only been an okay film for me.  This ending made it a much better film and it did catch me off guard.  I won’t spoil it here. but I can practically guarantee that you will never see it coming.  The ending really changed the way you perceive at the rest of the film and it helps make things that had come prior make sense.

Split is one of those movies that you may need to revisit after seeing it once to actually see what things you may have missed upon first viewing.  I have to say that I appreciate when a director and a film can catch me unexpected, especially in this world of social media and internet spoilers.

Perhaps M. Night Shyamalan has actually turned a corner and returned to form.  Hopefully, he learned a lesson and he can continue to give us compelling films that challenge us and keep us guessing.

4.1 stars

I think I can come up with some better titles for Vin Diesel’s return to the XXX franchise.  How about…

XXX:  Physics is Just a Suggestion

or…

XXX:  Yeah, We Know It’s Stupid, But You’re Here Anyway

or…

XXX:  I’m Vin Diesel

Maybe you can guess what I thought of this film.  When the trailer came out, I cringed.  It looked horrendous.  It had to be better, didn’t it?  The answer to that is… this movie was exactly what the trailers were showing it as.

Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) was retired until the government came looking for him to help retrieve a devise stolen by a group of terrorists that could control satellites in orbit and crash them to the earth.  One of these satellite had already crashed and claimed the life of Xander Cage’s “friend”, Nick Fury.  (Wait…. it is not Nick Fury… they just want you to think of him as Nick Fury.  It is Samuel L. Jackson and he played Gibbons).

So Cage sets off to find the terrorists (which he does easily) after reuniting a band of misfit XXX agents.  Toni Collette is here too as some cold government agent who recruited Cage.

This was just a stupid movie.  The dialogue was ridiculous.  The acting was terrible.  Vin Diesel did nothing but smirk and ham it up for the camera and walk around like he was the king of everything.  The heroes ran between bullets without any trouble and shot the disposable villains with ease.  There was absolutely zero stakes or zero intelligence involved in XXX: The Return of Tattoos (seriously, how secret can you be with the XXX tattooed on the back of your bald head?)

The action was not even remotely possible.  There was one scene where one of the terrorists, Talon (Tony Jaa) dropkicked a guy on a motorcycle and landed on the cycle himself.  You could almost see the cut in the film.

About midway through I was thinking how not even Captain America or the Black Widow could get away with doing some of the ridiculous maneuvers that these XXX people were doing… and Cap and Widow are super heroes.  Meanwhile, Xander Cage and Xiang (Donnie Yen) and Serena (Deepika Padukone) as well as the others are doing these tricks like its nothing.  This world is presented to me as if they were agents, not super heroes and that means that they shouldn’t be able to do impossible things.

And even that could be looked past if there was anything here but a stupid, predictable story.  I mean… Fast and the Furious is much the same way, but those movies are fun.  XXX: Let’s Make America Dumb Again is not fun at all.  I had zero fun in this movie.

I will admit that I kind of liked Rory McCann as the alliterative Tennyson Torch.  He had some comic relief moments that did not fall completely flat and he was not as cliched as everything else in the film.  And there was a surprise cameo near the end that didn’t completely suck.

And … could they make Sam L. Jackson more like Nick Fury?  I mean, they aren’t even trying to hide it.  Of course, Vin Diesel’s dialogue could only improve if he were to only say “I am Groot.”

I had never seen the other XXX movies and I will not be rushing out to see them.  It seemed to me that I could feel myself getting dumber as I watched XXX as the movie seemed never to end.  If you can completely shut your mind down and just enjoy some really impossible stunts and a stupid story where you clearly know what is going to happen next, well XXX: The Return of the Cash Grab is for you.

1 star

Monster Trucks was like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial if E.T. really sucked.

To be fair, if I were ten years old, this film might have been more entertaining.  There were many moments in the film that felt like throwbacks to my youth, seeing those old ’80s movies with a monster/alien/animal meeting a kid and getting help to go home.

Honestly, Monster Trucks has beat for beat story points to E.T.  Cute alien.  Oil=Reese’s Pieces.  Trying to get home.  Evil oil company=government agents.  Bicycles=mo9nster trucks.

See.  There are a ton of similarities.

Tripp (Lucas Till) is a young boy who is trying to build his own truck out of parts from the junkyard where he works.  Trying to avoid a troublesome home life, Tripp meets a monster that had been released from a subterranean environment by an oil company drilling for a huge oil pocket.  Bonding, Tripp and Creech (named by Tripp) found out that Creech could be used as his truck’s motor.  Unfortunately, a group of cruel mercenaries, led by the one-note villain Burke (Holt McCallany), was hired by oil executive Reece Tenneson (Rob Lowe) to recapture the creature.  You see, he did not want to let anyone know that there was a new species of creature living in the water pocket above the oil he wanted to drill because that would stop them from drilling.  And Tenneson was ready to do whatever he had to to get it done.

The story has so many dumb things happen.  The amount of property damage caused by some of the chase scenes were so unrealistic that it took me out of the story.  Tripp just crashed through other cars without even one concern over it.

There were no other interesting characters. Honestly, Creech was almost more interesting than any of the human characters.  The relationship between Tripp and Creech was fairly cute, so much so that it almost makes you forget that Tripp was at first tried to crush it to death with a car compacter and that he was then taking advantage of Creech to be his truck’s engine.

The CGI of the creature was decent.  Some of the stunts with the truck did not look great.  Some of the “live-action” stunts looked ridiculous.  There were so many things that were stupid and I sat in the theater and thought to myself, “Why are they doing this or that?”  The action sets are poorly thought out and put together.

Again, the action set pieces look great if you are ten years old.

The dialogue is ridiculous.  The characters are wooden and dull.  The action is boring.  Jane Levy, who played Meredith, was a really cute girl who I did like.  She had a sweetness about her that was appealing.  She should have better material than this junk (she was in Don’t Breathe, which is considerably better material).

Monster Trucks was not as offensive as I thought it was going to be.  It is, by no means, good, but I did not come out of it angry about seeing it.  I can see many ten-year old kids really liking this, and then, when they are older, realizing that they really didn’t know what they were watching.

1.9 stars

This film really should have been great.

Live By Night was directed by Ben Affleck, who has been amazing as a director, and it was released in December in limited release as if it were up for Oscar contention.  There shouldn’t be any Oscars for this film.

This was not a good movie.

Set in Prohibition time, Joe Coughlin (Ben Affleck) is a low-level crook who has tried to avoid becoming a gangster.  He is a son of a police captain so he gets some extra breaks.  However, when his latest bank robbery led to the death of some police officers, Joe cannot avoid prison.  After getting out, he gives up the ghost and joins in the gangster life anyhow.  Moving to Florida, Joe leads the illegal rum trade.

Oh, there was a relationship with Joe and the wife/moll/girlfriend of mobster Albert White (Robert Glenister).  She was played by Emma Gould.  There was zero chemistry with ben Affleck and it made no sense.  Then she died.

Then, later Joe gets involved with another woman, a Cuban woman named Graciella Suarez (Zoe Saldana).  This relationship did not work either.

The character of Joe was widely inconsistent.   At first he was never going to be in the mob.  Then he was in the mob and doing anything he wants.  Then he wasn’t a killer.  Later on he is killing everyone.  You never knew what this character was going to do next because the writing was so poor.

Then with this film, there were rapid switches in plot.  It was like they took a bunch of plot points and threw them into the film.  At first, the film was a love story with Joe and his love.  Then it became a revenge movie but it immediately changed from that into a crime drama.  Then, suddenly, there was the Klu Klux Klan and it was a racial storyline.  After the Klan was gone, then we got a female Christian preacher story fighting against the casino.  There are so many other plots involved here that this movie did not know what it was.

Be Affleck did not seem to be giving his best work here either. Maybe he just did not fit the part, but I have seen many more performances better by Affleck than this one.

This could have been better, should have been better, but it was not.  This film was too long and jumped around too much.  I do not think that they knew the theme that they wanted to have because the message was so mixed up.  Quite a disappointment.

2 stars

Please do not ask me why this movie is titled “Sleepless.”  I have no idea.  It feels like they used one of those random name generators and this was the first name that popped up.  Unfortunately, the film deserves a throwaway title since it would then match the throwaway movie.

Jamie Foxx played Vincent, the cop who is supposed to be dirty but we all know he isn’t really.  Vincent and his really dirty (but not so much, as we find out later) partner T.I (who plays Sean) steal some drugs from a gang of criminals.  Those drugs were meant to be passed along to criminal Novak (Scoot McNairy) by criminal Rubino (Dermont Mulroney) but since Vincent stole it, Novak was mad and Rubino was mad too.  So (somehow he knew who had stole these drugs) Rubino kidnaps Vincent’s son Thomas (Octavius J. Johnson) and blackmails Vincent into bringing him the drugs.  Vincent does so but hides them in the bathroom before going in to see Rubino (I guess to keep some leverage) but Internal Affairs cop Jennifer Bryant (Michelle Monaghan), who has been investigating Vincent and his partner for months, follows Vincent to Rubino’s casino and finds the drugs and hides them again.  Then, hilarity ensues.

Okay, maybe no hilarity ensued.

This was a really stupid movie with so many plot holes and moments of ridiculousness.  Jamie Foxx, who is a solid actor, really deserves better than this crapfest.

And, worst yet, there is someone in the police working with Novak, and the minute after the film let that drop, I immediately thought, “Oh, that is going to be [SPOILER}.”  And of course, I was right.  It was the easiest twist to guess I have seen in a long time.  Any time a film is that easy to predict, especially with the supposedly shocking surprise, it loses me.  Sleepless lost me pretty quickly.

Plus, our main characters appeared to be impossible to kill.  They were shot and stabbed and damaged multiple times but they survived easily.  Bryant, who appeared to be [spoilers] at death’s door from a gunshot wound (and a horrible car crash) at the end of the movie, makes some kind of amazing recovery and, I guess, left the hospital the same day.

Characters also do the stupidest things.  Thomas is able to escape from his captors (because they left the door open…not kidding) and he finds the phone of the secret crooked cop just sitting around. He then called his father Vincent, who tells him to wait for him in the club.  Now, this kid is still being looked for by all the killers and drug dealers that were running around the casino, so his advice was wait for me in the club area?  How about you tell him to head for the exit and get the hell out of the building while you still can?  There are so many stupid situations in this movie that I could be writing all night long.

The villains are underdeveloped.  Poor Dermont Mulroney is just terrible.  I’m no sure why he did what he did.  At least he survived [spoiler].

And Jamie Foxx has an amazing, self-cleaning suit coat.  After getting a bunch of white sugar all over it, a scene or two later, it was completely clean.  These were the things I kept seeing.

Sleepless was not a good movie.  It is January.

1.3 stars

2016 was a year full of great horror movies.  The first one of 2017 does not continue that trend.

In fact, there was a point early in The Bye Bye Man where one character looks to another one and said, “Want to go watch something dumb.”  I thought to myself, “I already am.”

It’s bad when the characters themselves are giving me the easy straight lines.

The Bye Bye Man is about three friends who are moving out of their college dorms into an old house.  In the house, there is an old end table with writing inside it that said “Don’t say it, don’t think it.”  It also had the name “The Bye Bye Man” carved into it.  The Bye Bye Man turned out to be some kind of evil creature that ends up killing people who say his name or who know about him.  He kills people by driving them crazy and having them do the killing themselves.

There are so many things that are atrocious here that I am not sure where exactly I should start.  First, the performances here are Oscar worthy…

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.

.

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Okay… maybe not.

The acting in this film is horrendous.  With all due respect to the actors in this movie, this is the worst acting I have seen in a long time.  This would be bad for TV movie of the week performances, let alone a wide release feature film.  There were many times when the lines of dialogue was downright laughable or characters would deliver them either monotone or way over the top.

The characters here are just stupid.  The young characters, Elliot (Douglas Smith), Sasha (Cressida Bonas) and John (Lucien Laviscount) are so stupid and underdeveloped.  Elliot and John are supposed to be childhood friends but I did not get that impression.  They kept showing a picture of the two characters on a youth baseball team, but that is not enough to show this connection.

There were multiple characters that felt completely irrelevant.  Carrie-Anne Moss shows up in a completely wasted role. She really does nothing in the movie and, honestly, when she does something, it is completely ridiculous.  Faye Dunaway is here too.  No, really.  She is a wasted role as well.  Honestly, why were either one of these women in this movie?

The horror cliches are everywhere in The Bye Bye Man.  The weird sounds in the old house?  Check.  Changing music when something scary is happening?  Check.  Stupid people doing stupid things?  Check.  Bad cell reception? Check.

There is a CGI dog in the film that belongs to the Bye Bye Man and it is some of the worst CGI you are going to see.  It feels very much like CGI from the 1980s or 1990s.  I literally laughed when we first see the glowing eyes of the dog in the dark room.  That is never a good sign.

Nothing is ever explained about the Bye Bye Man.  We are given no reason or origin or explanation for why this creature is doing what it is doing.  We don’t know where it came from.  We don’t know anything about it except you are not to “say it, or think it.”  That drove me nuts too because, how is it possible not to think it?  I mean…don’t think of a pink elephant.

There was a scene at the beginning of the movie where we see a reporter going crazy and killing his family and other people who he had told about the Bye Bye Man.  This scene was terrible and dull.  Much of the movie was dull as well.  Honestly, not a lot of things happen in the early part of the film.  Then near the end, there are so many laugh inducing scenes.  When the librarian gets run over… hysterical.

The Bye Bye Man is an early leader for worst film of the year.  January is once again the place where bad movies go to be released and this is the epitome of that rule.

The Bad Bad Man.

Bye Bye

0.75 stars

In January, we usually get some of the worst movies of the year, but we also get the films opening wide release that had opened in December to become eligible for Oscar consideration.  This is the category that Patriots Day falls into as this is an awesome movie based on an unbelievable story of a city facing terror and overcoming.

Boston, 2013.  The Boston Marathon is underway when two homemade bombs go off, injuring several and killing a few bystanders.  The next few days led to a manhunt throughout Boston in an attempt to capture the bombers.

There has been a lot of complaining about Mark Wahlberg’s character as Sgt. Tommy Saunders is the only main character in this film who is not based on a real life person.  However, this did not bother me at all.  I found this character to be meant to be a compilation of many individual heroes and first responders from Boston.

I also give Wahlberg a break here because he is awesome.  This is one of the best performances I have seen him give.  The scene where he broke down at his house with his wife (Michelle Monaghan) was tremendous and choked me up.

Wahlberg is not the only great performance though as Patriots Day is full of them.  John Goodman is great as Police Commissioner Ed Davis.  J.K. Simmons played Sgt. Jeffrey Pugliese of Watertown.  Kevin Bacon gives his typically strong performance as FBI Agent Richard DesLauriers.  Jimmy O. Yang is great too as Dun Meng, someone whose role in this story I did not know.

This movie plays as an extremely effective thriller as the different pieces of the puzzle are introduced individually.  As they all come together, you find yourself engaged in the story and the suspense is sky high.

Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg team up again to create an effective and engaging adventure based on a true story.  Deepwater Horizon from 2016 was a thrilling and breathtaking from this pair as was Lone Survivor.

One of the cool things that Peter Berg does here is that he mixes real security footage from the event into the movie.  He does it so smoothly that you do not even realize that it is happening several times.  At times in the film it has that documentary feel to it.

Another thing that this film does admirably is portray the brothers who committed this horrendous act as real characters.  Alex Wolff and Themo Melikidze take the roles of the Tsarnaev brothers and make them real people who have real lives.  When we see real security footage of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev going to get milk after the bombing, it has a surreal feel to it.

I must say that I am not sure the purpose of the scene where Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s wife (Katherine Russell) is interrogated.  It felt unnecessary for the narrative and was just shoehorned in to the film so it could be used in the trailers.   I think that whole scene could have been removed to make the film tighter.

Patriots Day is really a love letter to the people of Boston who rose to the occasion during these days of uncertainty as the whole nation looked for answers to this terrorist attack.  We saw many normal people serve very important roles in the capture of the brothers.  I really enjoyed the emotional roller coaster.

4.6 stars

Martin Scorsese has created a new film that is quite a departure form his other filmography, showing that he is not afraid to take a gamble on something different.

Silence is a beautifully shot film, with amazing exterior shots, that focuses on a story that is as unexpected as it is haunting.

It is in the 1600s and there are two Portuguese Christian priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who travel to Japan to spread the word of Christianity, and to search for a missing priest (Liam Neeson) who has reputedly denounced the Christian faith publicly.   Father Rodrigues (Garfield) could not believe his former mentor and teacher would ditch his religion and he spearheaded the trip to Japan.

However, the pair of priests faced opposition in Japan from the Buddhists, who saw the arrival of Christianity as a direct threat to their own religion and reacted violently to attempt to break those deeming themselves as Christians.

During the exceedingly long run time of the film, Father Rodrigues is captured by the Buddhists and they attempt to crush his faith and get him to denounce Christianity through several devastatingly tough, if not torturous, situations.  Rodrigues shot the gamut among his beliefs as he struggled to come to terms with the silence to his prayers.

Let’s start off with Andrew Garfield.  He is magnificent in this role.  I think this might be a better performance than Hacksaw Ridge, which was a brilliant job by Garfield.  Garfield really had to run the full range of emotions through this film and he did so with an amazing display of acting.  This film follows Garfield’s character throughout and his personal struggles gives the audience the chance to support someone.  His co-star Adam Driver gives a wonderful performance as well, one of the better performances I have seen out of our very own Kylo Ren.

As I said earlier, the movie was visually stunning and you can see how Scorsese really frames the story with breathtaking shots of the scenery.

Now, Silence does feel long, and tends to drag a little bit in the middle.  They really try to set up Father Rodrigues as their own martyr and make him their own Jesus.  There are a ton of religious implications here and I can understand if some people feel that this is too much religion.  I do not think that they beat us over the head with religion, but I can see the argument.

There are some brutal aspects here too, which are very effective.  It is amazing the horrible things that people will do in the name of their religion.  There was a whole “putting their foot on a picture of Jesus” thing that did not seem to have the same feel to me as it seemed to have for the characters on screen.  It was meant to show them discarding their faith, but it did not have the same gravitas for me than it seemed and that made me not feel what they intended.

Scorsese’s new film is very solid, but it does have a few flaws.  Andrew Garfield is not one of them.  He is brilliant here.  Adam Driver is great.  Liam Neeson does a very good job in a smaller role.  The story is well told and beautiful looking.  It is a haunting movie that can be very difficult to watch at times.

4 stars