Reviews

This film is essentially Peep Show + Skins meets Midsommar + Hereditary with a final splash of Jonathan Glazers banned British Cadbury's Flake commercial. It, as with the films it emulates, tries desperately hard to be "deep", "artistic" and create an unsettling atmosphere, a "mood" if you will. The only mood it created for me was one of boredom, and in the end I had to play the latter half of it on 2x speed. There's something lacking in the protagonists storyline that I could only imagine might be missing due to the irony of the writer and director, Emerald Fennell, being the very privately educated and somewhat clueless upper-class type that she seeks to ridicule. If there's nothing else on then it passes the time, but I wouldn't pay for it.

Having watched the first episode, I am struggling to see why this was renewed for a second season and I cannot imagine a third being on the horizon. Unless the more-wooden-than-Pinocchio Harold Perrineau (of Lost "Walt, Walt, Walt, where's my boy? Walt!" fame) has some arm-twisting secret info on the higher ups at MGM, little reason exists for there to be more of this. From the get go, the acting performance of the primary character is on a par with your local amateur dramatics groups' most obnoxious and over confident. The first true supposedly passionate scene is as emotionally flat as a steamrolled pancake and the cringing only gets worse. 52 minutes and 35 seconds of cheap, dull performances interspersed with cheap, dull CGI. I'm not certain that this isn't a made-to-flop scam a la "The Producers", because it certainly views like one.

Firstly, kudos to the casting team for picking Bella Ramsey rather than a generic actress who simply physically resembles the video game character of Ellie. I have not seen or heard of her before, but within the first few episodes she had proven herself to be - in my opinion - one of the greatest young actors out there. She is very believable which helps one to temporarily suspend reality and enjoy the story. Pedro Pascal is equally as talented and proficient, and together they make a capable team. The storyline is well-paced, unlike other drawn out zombie dramas (Yes, TWD) that consist of 15 episodes in a row of people whining while walking down railway lines. In TLOU, the characters' individual stories are actually weaved in to the narrative in a way that isn't too obnoxious or lengthy. What can I say, the script is good, the sets are well built, the costumes are well designed. Everything seems to have been beautifully refined. I can only hope that this doesn't go the way of the wonderful first season of Westworld and end up as the same pure trash. For now, it's very good.

I really don't know who rates this 10/10 or why, but I can only imagine it to be hardcore fans of the franchise who are happy to see anything new. To anyone else this is just another repetitive and boring, played-out story in which the killers are clear from the start. The whole breaking of the fourth wall and self-aware irony thread is ineffectual and feels like a time filler to pad out an already poor script. There's a point at which enough of one thing is enough, and "Scream" reached that point several movies ago.

Despite my undying love for Jenny Ortega I did not manage to finish this monotonous, drudging, poorly-written cash grab or even come close to it. It's pretty much unwatchable unless you're a super-fan.

As a fan of the BBC Luther series, I was surprised and happy to see this new film pop up on my Netflix feed. Unfortunately, the input of Netflix in to the Luther franchise is not a good one and it has clearly been engineered more towards American audiences.

You really need to suspend your disbelief, as the storyline is more like that of a video game or a horror movie than any realistic policing scenario. Things are very over-simplified and explained away with a few short words, and there are multiple nonsensical mistakes - like an injured Luther being airlifted to England from Norway via the white cliffs of Dover. Do they know where Norway is? The very end is also so American it is cringeworthy.

It is good for what it is - some mindless entertainment - just don't let yourself think while watching it.

This movie drives home the pain of abuse very effectively, primarily by torturing the watcher with its unending drudgery. Viewer beware: This is not any sort of exciting thriller, there are no shocks, surprises, twists or turns to be had. The tone is miserable from the start to the finish, and the storytelling itself is virtually absent. Almost nothing happens, and everything that does is painfully slow and ultimately inconsequential. It's just another boring straight-to-video quality story about the evil man being bad, with nothing new or innovative. Kendrick's acting is decent enough, but it's not as if she's expected to do anything other than look sadly at her phone for 90 minutes. Avoid.

This was, at one point, the most exciting thing on television. I do not recall ever looking forward to a new episode of anything as much as I did Sliders in the late 90's. From the pilot episode, I was absolutely hooked. The initial characters are a perfect team, the story-line intriguing and the writing well done.

Sadly, this all nose dives part way through the second season when the chemistry is thrown off with poor replacement actors (apparently the show needed sex appeal) and an endlessly grating quest against the "Kromaggs", a race of inter-dimensional Nazi's from an alternate Earth. In the first one or two seasons you never knew what you'd get, or what kind of world the adventurers would slide to. By season three, things become very predictable. Yet another boring Kromagg episode featuring a woman running around with a big gun. I never made it to season five, but for the first season and a half this show still deserves a solid 9/10.