The newest movie from director Steven Soderbergh looked different to me.  I had no idea why but there was something noticeable about it.  It was only after I finished watching the film that I found out the reason for it.

Soderbergh filmed the movie on an iPhone.  An iPhone 7 Plus to be specific.

Oh.  That’s why.

The first part of the film was noticeable, but soon, I had adjusted to the differences and was engaged in the story being told to me.

Sawyer (Claire Foy) has just moved away from her home in Boston with little reason and took a job across country, where her stock was rising.  The problem was that there was clearly something from her past that was bothering her, preventing her from moving on with her life.

Sawyer does what many people might do… approach a therapist allowing herself a chance to talk about the issues of her life.  In fact, Sawyer felt good about the session and wanted to schedule something for later in the week.  Then, the therapist asked her to fill out some paperwork and wait in the lobby.  Before Sawyer knew what had happened, she was being admitted involuntarily to the mental institution in an insurance scam.

Bu that was not yet the worst part.  Sawyer began seeing her stalker David (Joshua Leonard) working at the institution as an orderly named George and no matter who she tried to talk to, no one believed her.

Was Sawyer facing imminent peril or was this all in her own mind?  There were parts of the movie that played up the possibility that Sawyer was actually crazy and all of this was in her head.  That aspect of the film did not last long enough, as I would have liked to seen it played out more.  The fact is that this plotline was dropped rather quickly, although there were still minor hints throughout.  Had they tried to swerve at the end, it would have been troubling.

I must say, though, I was not a huge fan of the way the film did end.  Without spoiling anything, I would have preferred a different ending than what we got.

However, that did not ruin the film.  As soon as I adjusted to the different camera work until that ending, I was thoroughly engaged and intrigued by the film.  Claire Foy was remarkable as Sawyer.  She brought the character full circle and really played the fear and the pain that the character was feeling while acting out in ways (some violent) that kept us guessing whether or not she was truthfully sane.  Foy is easily the strongest pert of Unsane.

I also really enjoyed Jay Pharoah as Nate, a fellow inmate at the mental institution who makes friends with her and tries to help her along.

Joshua Leonard was another strong performance as David/George.  As I said earlier, I think the film may have dropped the George reveal too early, but Leonard brought some real gravitas to the part.  Leonard who was in the original Blair Witch Project has had a solid career since in these types of films.  And honestly, he did a fantastic job of making me hate this character he played and making me hope that he would get what was coming to him.

The filming on the iPhone 7 was an interesting choice by Soderbergh because it was effective in creating a certain mood for the audience.  It allowed some deeply claustrophobic shots and some atypical shots.  Once I adjusted to the manner in which the film was going to look, I was able to marvel at what could be done with technology today.  Soderbergh was able to take us right inside the mind of Sawyer and show us how she was dealing with these moments of insanity, whether around her or inside her own head.

Though there are some issues with the story and some plot contrivances that were stretches, I enjoyed this movie very much.  An excellent performance from Claire Foy anchored the film and helped cover any problems up.  A very solid psychological thriller with horror elements, Unsane is a tense and thrilling ride.

3.8 stars

Video game movies are typically poor.  Perhaps it is because they try too much to stick to the way the video game presents the story.  Or maybe they just believe that the audience will simply be there because the I.P. is known.  I don’t know, but the track record is pretty poor.

The new rebooted Tomb Raider is not going to end the talk about the weak video game movie, but it is not too bad.  There is one main reason why Tomb Raider succeeds, and her name is Alicia Vikander.

Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) is an independent woman who, despite being heir to a huge fortune, refuses to sign the papers that would give her access.  The reason?  Her father disappeared seven years before and by signing those papers, Lara would have to admit to the fact that her beloved father (Dominic West) was truly dead, and she was not ready to do that.  However, through circumstances, Lara discovered the truth about what her father had been working on at the time of his disappearance and she took off to see what she could find.

I was not a fan of the Angelina Jolie Lara Croft films or the video games, so I was easily able to step into this film without any predetermined opinions, and what I was able to come away with was something I can remember since seeing Ex Machina and The Danish Girl.  Alicia Vikander is absolutely gorgeous.

Vikander commands the screen like few stars today do.  She is amazingly beautiful and I would be willing to watch her in just about any movie at any time.  Vikander is not just a beautiful face and an unbelievable physical being, but she is also a tremendous actress.  She brings more to the role of Lara Croft than you would think could be brought.  In this film, there was not a great deal of dialogue for her to use, but you could always see the compelling and depth of emotions from Vikander via body language and facial expressions.  She is the type of actress that you simply cannot take your eyes off and she elevates this material.  I am absolutely certain that had this role been any other actress, I would not have enjoyed this film in the manner that I did.  Alicia Vikander is a total star.

Then, I really enjoyed the first two acts of this movie.  Lara Croft was not made out to be a super hero.  She had flaws and she failed as she moved along in her life.  This made her even more relatable of a character.  The scene with the bicycle race at the beginning of the film is a perfect example of this (which also was a fantastic action scene).

Another great thing about Lara was she is portrayed as being very smart and, I believed that, because of the way Alicia Vikander played her.

Now, the third act crumbled as the story took a turn into a different type of movie with a ridiculous premise and story twist that came out of nowhere.  There were several puzzles for Lara to solve to make it through the tomb and the problem with those was none of them were puzzles that could be solved by the audience.  It took much of the fun from the film.

The villain was played by Walter Goggins and he was a one note villain who was after what was inside the tomb for reasons… but none that made any sense.  Goggins is a great actor, but this role was so thin that it would not matter whom you placed in this role.  It would all be the same.

There were some very strong action pieces, such as Lara Croft hanging off a crashed airplane above a waterfall or a chase scene though London after some pickpockets.  Yet, I was not much of a fan with the action pieces in the third act, particularly the final fight with Goggins.

Still, there is more here that I think is good than is bad, and this film has the unbelievably talented and attractive Alicia Vikander making a perfect Lara Croft.  I think if they make more films in this franchise with the current crew, this could be just the beginning of something excellent.   For now, this film will have to settle for being fun and an overall good time.

3.3 stars

In 1976, an Air France Flight was hijacked and taken to Entebbe, Uganda and held hostage in an attempt to force the Israeli government to release a group of known terrorists.  This led to one of the most daring rescue missions ever attempted.

Unfortunately, at times, 7 Days in Entebbe felt like 7 days watching it, as the film failed to tap into the natural suspense that encompassed the real life situation.

Wilfried Böse (Daniel Brühl) and Brigitte Kuhlmann (Rosamund Pike) were two German activists/terrorists who helped mastermind the hijacking, but they seemed to have more of a fluffy, kind-hearted side to them.  And they weren’t Nazis for sure, as they said several times, despite separating the Jewish people from the rest of the group.

The rest of the terrorists were from Palestine and they were trying to receive not only money from Israel, but also the freedom for other Palestinian terrorists.  The battle between Israel and Palestine rages to this day, despite plenty of attempts to bring the hatred to an end.

The film bounced around from Wilfried and Brigitte to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Lior Ashkenazi) to soldier Yoni Netanyahu (Angel Bonanni).  There was really no one for the audience to cheer for.  The film does try to humanize Wilfried and Brigitte but neither of them caught my attention outside of the fact that I have always enjoyed the work of Pike and, particularly, Daniel Brühl.  The lack of a protagonist for this film really limits how the audience is able to connect and harms the narrative.

The pacing of the story was slow and made the whole story boring.  Then, when the actual rescue mission was under way, it was underwhelming.

The best part of the film was a very strange dance/musical number that started the film and was intertwined within the rescue mission itself.  This was energetic and entertaining, even if I had no idea why it was included or what it was meant to represent.

This does not reach the limits that this story could have reached and turned one of the most amazing rescues in recent history as a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it typical third act plot point.

2.4 stars

Here is another one of those comedies that is just not funny.  I was not looking forward to this one and I was not surprised.

Harold (David Oyelowo) is a mid-level employee at a company run by crooked Richard Rusk (Joel Edgerton) and sexpot Elaine Markinson (Charlize Theron).  The three of them head to Mexico to do stuff (I honestly don’t remember why) and Harold disappears.  Harold runs afoul of the local drug cartel, many locals looking for him and other various sundries.  Meanwhile, Richard and Elaine returned to the USA but have to reconsider what they had planned when Harold called them saying he had been kidnapped.

To start with… this plot is needlessly convoluted despite not having any depth to it at all.  There is a plot involving a pot (aka marijuana) pill that involved Amanda Seyfried somehow, a drug cartel leader who seems to love the Beatles, Harold’s cheating wife (Thandie Newton), a sexual encounter between Richard and Elaine, Elaine trying to stab Richard in the back by going out with Cameron from Ferris Buehler, and Richard hiring his conveniently mercenary brother (Sharlto Copley) to bring Harold back.. or kill him depending on the scene.  Actually Sharlto Copley was probably the most entertaining character in the film.

Of course, Charlize Theron is magnificent to watch on screen as well.

After that… not much here.

Harold is a major problem.  You see, at this plant in Mexico that the three of them go to see, Harold seems to have done a lot there because everyone knows him.  So much so that the Drug Cartel leader thought that Harold was the boss.  Harold is shown as a whimpering, weak willed man, except of course when the plot needs him to do something else.  There is a scene where he is being kidnapped by the drug cartel and he grabs the guy sitting in front of him with a gun, causes him to shoot the driver and is able to buckle his seat belt before the car goes into a massive crash, killing the captors.  Where did he get these skills?  Later, Harold shows off some shooting skills that we never knew he had.

Watching David Oyelowo try and play this was very hard to watch.  He is a much better actor than the crap he was asked to do.

A mess of a film that I have already spent too much time on.  It’s late.  That’s all I have to say… turn your clocks ahead remember!!!

1.5 stars

Okay.  I did not hate this film. I’ve seen some really bad reviews for it and it did not strike me as that horrid.  However, it is not a good movie.

This is a sequel to a film that I did not see, but this sequel is one in which barely touches on what had come before.  In fact, the only connection between The Strangers: Prey at Night and the original Strangers film is that there are three killers with masks who are killing people for apparently no reason.

So in this film, we have a family of four on their way to drop off Kinsey (Bailee Madison) at a boarding school.  I guess she is a troublemaker, but we really don’t see much of that.  They get a late start because Kinsey was causing trouble and Luke (Lewis Pullman), the oldest looking 17-year old ever, was playing baseball.

I guess the morale of this story is never be late.

They arrived at an apparently deserted mobile home where they are quickly stalked and attacked by these three mask wearing psychos.  Mom (Christina Hendricks) and Dad (Martin Henderson) are quick kills, leaving the young girl and her unbelievably older “teenage” brother to try and avoid being stabbed to death.

One of the biggest problem with this was I am sitting in the theater and I am constantly thinking about what I would do in this situation.  Then, I watch these stupid people do the exact opposite of what I would do.  You have got killers with  knives, an axe and a truck.  Why don’t these victims just find as many knives in the kitchens of these mobile homes and go after the killers.  You need to go on offense.

Then, there was a gun.  There is a car.  These things were consistently being lost by these stupid characters.

The characters of the family were so weak that I had no qualms about them dying.  The mother died so quickly that her death held little impact.

And… it was clear that none of these people ever watched Zombieland, because they did not follow the double tap rule.

Jeremy Jahns said in his review that he pictured the guys from Cabin in the Woods sending that gas up to make these people do stupid things, and that was a perfect way to look at it.  I did not hate this as much as Jeremy did, but most of my enjoyment was trying to think about what these stupid people should have done.

2.1 stars

I was able to see an early showing of Greg Berlanti’s new coming of age film, Love, Simon.  It is officially opening March 16th, so the chance to see it this week was interesting.

Simon Spier (Nick Robinson)is a 17-year old senior who has three great friends, a wonderful family he loves and what looks to be a great life.  Only one thing, he has a secret.  He is gay.

When another student posts anonymously on a web site that he was gay, Simon began a written e-mail correspondence with the boy named “Blue.” Curiosity filled Simon as he speculated about several of the possible Blues.

This film was very clever and beautiful.  I really liked the format in which it told the story.  Every time Simon focused in on a potential subject, that actor would assume the role of Blue, reading off e-mails and being pictured, in Simon’s mind, as the mysterious e-mailer. That technique kept the audience off guard and prevent the mystery of who Blue was a secret.

And Simon’s mind was an ample place as we got many creative scenes involving these possible Blues, including a dance number.  It brought a great deal of fun to the film that could have focused on the drama only.

There were several other wonderful characters here as well, portrayed by an astounding cast.  Simon’s parents, Jack and Emily (Josh Duhamel and Jennifer Garner), were progressive and engaging.  Simon’s friends Leah (Katherine Langford), Abby (Alexandra Shipp), and Nick (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) all have problems of their own.  They are all three-dimensional characters and I believed everything they did.  This young group of four actors, including Nick Robinson, are extremely talented and do a wonderful job with everything that was given to them.

Logan Miller was also standout as the trying-to-hard Martin.  I have to say, there was something that I thought was going to happen near the end of the film that did not happen and I was happy that the film avoided that cliche.  I don’t want to go into it because it could swerve into spoiler territory and I don’t want that.

The teaching staff at the school was certainly unrealistic, but remarkably funny.  In particular was Ms. Albright (Natasha Rothwell) and Mr. Worth (Tony Hale) who stole every scene in which they were in.  Natasha Rothwell’s delivery of her lines were comedic perfection.

I did think that the ending of the movie was too sweet and saccharine to be realistic, but I cannot fault Berlanti for wanting to provide that grand romantic resolution for a young gay couple that movies have usually reserved for heterosexual pairings.   It speaks to the greater acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle coming from the youth of the world.  Sure there are some of the idiocy of the past bleeding into the film, but the vast majority is shown to be accepting of the news, at least eventually.  Society has come quite a long way. At one point in my life time, this film would have been massively controversial.

Love, Simon is like a fairy tale romance (no pun intended) that also looks at the challenge and the fears involved in coming out.  What will my family, my friends, my peers think of me now that I have come out? Who am I now?  These questions are handled with humor, sincerity and a heart-felt courage while putting on a highly entertaining movie.  Yes, it may go too far into the world of sappiness, but its heart is in the right place.

4.1  stars

Disappointing.

I had been looking forward to this adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s classic science fiction children’s book A Wrinkle in Time.  Unfortunately, it looks as if the ideas and concepts in the novel could not be adapted to the big screen.

The film itself was not good.  Yes, there are many who say that wonderful director Ava DuVernay took some big chances and really swung for the fences on this.  While true, that should not be an excuse for creating something that was not good.

Meg (Storm Reid) is a young teen girl and she had a close relationship with her father (Chris Pine), working on big brain scientific stuff.  When he goes missing, Meg becomes depressed and starts to change her mannerisms.  She becomes angry and quick to respond.  Four years pass and she is still getting into fights with the stereotypical mean girls at her school and trying to still protect her young adopted brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe).

When Meg is approached by some inter-dimensional witches who had already befriended  Charles Wallace, she, her brother and tag along “boyfriend” Calvin (Levi Miller) go across the dimensions in search of her father, whom they believed was alive and lost.

Let’s start off with the strengths of this movie. Storm Reid is wonderful in the lead role. There is something original and fresh about her and she is very compelling.  Her relationship with Chris Pine as her father and Levi Miller as Calvin were strengths of the movie.

Much of the movie was beautiful to look at.  The CGI and the effects were lovely, for the most part.

Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling were fine as the witches Mrs. Which, Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Who respectfully.  However, there was not much for any of them to do.  None of these characters had any real compelling reason to be involved in this story.  Unfortunately, Oprah felt like a big time distraction as every time she was on the screen I was thinking that this was Oprah and looking at the funny things glued to her face.

Kaling was completely wasted as the only thing she seemed to be here for was to spout off quotes from the world.  Even more of a waste was the use of Michael Peña, who was in the film for just a few minutes. 

The story itself felt very flimsy.  The scientific parts were brushed over which made a lot of what was happening feel confusing, and the story reduced itself to a very simplistic take on let’s find daddy and love vs. evil.

The antagonist is extremely underwhelming and we have no idea what it is supposed to be, except of course for evil.  We do not know why this evil creature, known as It (not Pennywise, by the way) wants Meg to join him so badly.

Sadly, A Wrinkle in Time felt very long and, at time, boring.  The movie is not long in comparison to some of the other blockbusters released these days, but it definitely felt longer than it was.

Maybe this is truly a book that is unfilmable and we should appreciate the attempt.  There are good parts of the film and I definitely found Storm Reid to be a wonderfully refreshing change, but A Wrinkle in Time just does not live up to the reputation of Disney or the original source material.

2.5 stars

Tremendously terrible.

This one falls into the category of totally horrible movies that entertain you with how bad they are.  I did not sit in the theater grumbling about how bad this movie was because I was too busy laughing at the unintentionally funny parts of it.

As a film, this thing is B…A..Double D… BADD.

An Treasury Agent teams up with a weatherman to try to stop a theft of $600 million dollars of old bills scheduled to be shredded.  Oh, and the theft was planned to take place during a hurricane.

Maggie Grace, Shannon from LOST and probably more well known as Liam Neeson’s oft kidnapped daughter from the Taken franchise, stars as the Treasury Agent Casey.  Grace is passable in the role though she seemed to be able to do way more than one would expect a Treasury Agent to be able to do.  She is, at least, a presence on the screen and is enjoyable to watch.

Toby Kebbell, however, as Will was saddled with having to perform a… I’m going to guess… Southern accent throughout the entire film that was much more distracting than anything else happening.  When he first started talking, I had to stifle a laugh.  I would not stifle many more as the film progressed.

Everything in here so so ridiculous.  The stunts, the physics, the dialogue…. just terrible.  The film started off in a flashback of young Will and his obnoxious brother Breeze out with their father as a hurricane approached.  They were desperately trying to get away, but their truck winds up off road and the boys have to take shelter in an empty house in the middle of nowhere.  As father started outside to try and get the truck freed, you knew what was going to happen.  The storm started bringing the house down and the father got crushed by a rolling water tower in a moment that should not have been as hilarious as it looked.  It reminded me again of LOST how so many people wound up getting killed by being hit by a bus.

Move to the future, the brothers are estranged for, you know, reasons, but Will is still trying to help his brother as another massive hurricane is forming and only Will can correctly identify it because of his sense.  But Breeze is a hard drinking loser who sits around his house in his underwear.  Any guesses if Breeze will find redemption in the third act?

When Casey and Will meet up and help each other out, since Will has a storm chasing vehicle he called the Dominator that can brave the storm. The pair of them go about keeping the bad guys at bay for much of the film.  One of the funniest and cringe-worthiest moments came when Will grabbed a bunch of hubcaps and started hurling them Captain America-like into the wind of the hurricane and one of them wound up buried into one of the villain’s chests.

Of course, Casey and Will were not always on the same page, despite them asking each other constantly, like Aladdin to Jasmine, “Do you trust me?”  Casey suggested, despite Will’s strong objections, that they make the Dominator into a car bomb, much like Timothy McVeigh.  We even go as far as seeing them grabbing bags of fertilizer.  Thing is, I did not see them actually pull it off.  Maybe I was dozing at the time…or perhaps it was a restroom break.  Either way, it felt like it was dropped.

Then, the final semi truck chase scene with a barrelling hurricane behind them is as stupid as you can imagine.  It felt like a Fast and the Furious movie with less sense or realism.

The film was really bad and there was little redeeming quality to it.  My mind immediately went to how great this film would be if it were being riffed by RiffTrax or covered by Mystery Science Theater 3000.  That is this film’s future.

0.8 stars

I had not seen the 1974 film Death Wish, starring Charles Bronson so I did not have that crutch coming into the new version directed by Eli Roth and starring Bruce Willis.  I do plan on watching this version late4r this afternoon, but it did not affect my viewpoint on the film.

I will say that I had very low expectations coming into the film.  I am not going to comment on the pulse of the nation after the most recent school shooting.  That should not go into the review.  Neither will my own personal opinion on guns and the ability to easily get them.

Bruce Willis plays a surgeon named Paul Kersey, whose wife gets killed and his daughter is put into a coma after a house robbery that turns deadly.  Frustrated that the police were getting nowhere with the case, Kersey winds up taking up a gun, putting on a hoodie and going onto the streets of Chicago looking for vigilante justice.  Dubbed “The Grim Reaper” by the press, Willis continues hi search for the men who murdered his wife.

The is nothing original here.  We have seen this revenge story countless times, and done in a considerably better way.  The Netflix Punisher series just recently was way better than this despite covering many of the same tropes and issues.  The film could have taken itself in several interesting ways dealing with loss or dealing with how grief can change a man, but it really only takes the most surface level of story.

And a surface level story is fine if you have other things with it.  Unfortunately, a second major drawback here is Bruce Willis.  I love Bruce Willis, but he has not had a great performance in a while (maybe since Looper).  Paul Kersey has zero development of character.  When we first see him, he is called from one surgery to head to E.R.  He walked into an operation room where a police officer had multiple gunshot wounds and was flatlining.  He put his fingers to the cop’s neck and pronounced him dead without doing anything to him.  Then, he went and told his partner that they did everything they could.  I immediately perked up because that was simply not true so I thought maybe this guy was damaged somehow.

However, we then see him at home where he has a beautiful wife and a beautiful daughter who has just been accepted to a college in New York.  Willis looks to have a perfect life.  So why was he so unemotional at his job?  Is it just that he has seen so many gunshot wounds that he has become hardened to them?  You would think that we would then see that in the film, but it is never addressed again.

In fact, no one has a character arc in the story except for Kersey’s brother Frank (Vincent D’Onofrio), who changes his life after his sister-in-law is killed.  However, Frank is treated like crap by his brother.

There are some fun moments of violence that are put together like an old 1980s action film intended to gain an applause response from the crowd.  These are done fairly well.  There are some spots throughout that, if you turn off your brain, you can find entertaining.  However, there are also moments of extreme humor that is absolutely unintentional.  One of the robbers was going to tie up daughter Jordon (Camila Morrone) and he was searching through the kitchen cupboards.  He even stopped to say, “Where is the rope?”  I almost fell off the seat.

This was not as horrendous as I thought it was going to be, but it is not a good movie.  There is really no character arc at all, little plot, and only passably entertaining action.  Bruce Willis is a much better actor than he shows here.  There is zero subtlety in a story that could have had plenty.  Eli Roth is more interested in the in your face aspect than any kind of character study.  The rebooted Death Wish is not worth your time.

2 stars