Reviews

This movie is entertaining but thin on the ground. I was much more interested in the soft porn aspects than anything else and the scariest part was witnessing each of the girls mount the massively hung black dude. It was shocking in that respect, knowing that young and innocent Jenna Ortega would be taking her turn next, and I did appreciate the tongue-in-cheek bravado of it all, but it's not a horror movie, more like a porn-slash-comedy with nasty bits in between.

If you want to see a real sex-based horror movie that will shock you to the core, I recommend A Serbian Film! Rather, I don't recommend it, in fact, stay away, it's way too much for most viewers.

I enjoyed X to a point, but for all the wrong reasons I think. I wasn't scared, just randy at the end instead.

Funnily enough, I enjoyed this movie even though I'm giving it an average 5-star rating. Normally, I'd leave it at that and move on, but I feel compelled to explain why it gets such a middling 5 out of 10.

The person that I got to know at the start turned out to be quite arrogant and dislikeable by the end. I thought this movie was supposed to be about living life and enjoying it no matter who you are. In the end, if you get slim, take control and become a power person you are living life. What about all the low-confidence people who get left behind and don't have that sort of willpower, like 90% of us? I totally get the message; lose the pounds, get fit, dump your using flatmates, etc.; but I did not enjoy the end reward experienced by the main character. Maybe I just wanted to hear more jokes (it wasn't very funny), enjoy more comedy and maybe see a fat chick debasing herself while trying to run a marathon? Instead, I felt a rather dry cliche of needing to be empowered to have a good life. The movie actually took itself seriously in the end, which felt like a false advertising statement for the spectacle I wanted to watch.

And then the overt wokeness of just about every character from beginning to end, which made me cringe. Yes, every couple is now interracial, gay or alternative. You don't get one regular couple anymore? There is no average. Let me list them for you: the white sister and her black husband, the Asian roommate and her white boyfriend, the main character and her Indian lover (although she did date a regular guy, which didn't work out), the estranged and divorced friend, the very large lady at the party and her skinny husband - like they couldn't both be fat and enjoy each other, the best friend and his male boyfriend, obviously. If the doctor had a wife (we didn't see her) she would have been eight foot tall or a two-foot Guatamalan pigmy.

Although very watchable, the message tried to jigsaw every possible misdemeanor and possible loose thread into a plausible it'll be OK in the end type of message. So cuddly and perfect and farmhouse cheddar. It's a shame because I liked the movie as a whole, but my eyes are now rolling in retrospect.

The lead role, known as Mikey Saber, is a disorganized scumbag who cares about his own pleasures and nothing else, so why is he so likable and disarming?

Could it be his gigantic penis and his ability to charm people who should know better than to touch him with a barge pole? The last thing you need is a Mikey Sabre character walking into the household and stirring up the local community, but maybe that's the whole point? We need such characters in our dull lives, even on our dull movie screens.

Even with recognized drug dealers on the doorstep, life is pretty tepid in this hokey town and nothing happens much at all. Even though we detest the bad boy and ultimately cast him out, perhaps he stimulates the most exciting month EVER?

Personally, I had to review this movie in retrospect because I didn't like it that much at first, but after comparing it to so much tiresome fodder on the screen today, I can now see the irreverence behind it all. If you're looking for a moral summary, you're not going to find it here, as Mikey swans off to his next adventure, literally with the clothes on his back, two hundred dollars and his new beau at his side, which is all he really wants from life and all he deserves.

After all, I liked Mikey for being an asshole and hitting the self destruct button, which is his problem, not mine, who succeeds in prejudicing himself but also helps to make things interesting along the way.

Like most Bond movies, the potential here is fantastic, with amazing attention to detail and thrills from beginning to end. But like the majority of Bond movies, the further you get into the plot, the less interesting and feasible it becomes.

There really is no excuse for putting a film on pause after two hours to get some things done around the house, but this is what happened to me, deciding to watch the final showdown later. How did such an exciting premise become so predictable and stale all of a sudden? Unfortunately, it's the same feel good and over-simplified commercial Bond fodder we've been getting ever since I can remember.

Take a movie like JFK (1991) by Oliver Stone. It runs for a similar length of time and gets more and more complicated as the plot unravels, but Stone does a magnificent job of summarizing everything so that we don't get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information, nor get bored. In Bond 2021, the potentially confusing plot is massively dumbed down to excuse the rather tepid final twist, of going to a secret island to kill all the baddies and save the world. Yes, that's how simple NTTD really is.

It's well made enough to merit your emotional input, but without enough mental or intellectual payback to be memorable. The sacrifice that this movie makes is too sentimental, through the actual Bond retirement of Daniel Craig, who didn't need to be killed off so easily and cheesily. And the racial woke introduction of the new black 007 - who added little and did practically nothing - was equally Dutch Edam.

So much effort was put into this movie to fill the box office coffers, which I fell for like many others did, but it's not good enough to have aesthetically pleasing locations and sets, only to make a move that is ultimately empty and forgettable.

Every year there seems to be at least one Oscar-nominated movie that fails to resonate with me. They are usually artistic but ultimately dull. It's my fault, I guess, for regularly buying into the critic recommendations and the need to find the next profound moment in film.

Last year it was Minari, before that, Roma, The Shape of Water, the list goes on... and here we go again.

I wouldn't be surprised if TPOTD wins across the board for amazing dust storm effects, profound acting, especially realistic cowboy hats, etc.; but most of all, this is essentially a movie about next to nothing.

Does the wife get cheated on, does the boy get seduced, does the family get beleaguered by indians? Does anything happen? No. The nasty stinky brother dies of anthrax in the end, which is about it.

This movie is no Groundhog Day and has no overall aim of revealing more depth after multiple views, probably because it doesn't have that much to it, but it does provide a compelling showpiece that gets progressively stronger.

I felt an initial pang of disappointment after 40 minutes that so much of the movie still remained, expecting it to be very drawn out before the final conclusion. Luckily, the repeat viewpoints from all three protagonists helps to congeal the understanding of what's actually going on and how intense the situation is.

What makes the story so strong is the way the second part is told through the actual rape, which is skipped over in the first part because the main actor didn't actually witness it. However, the final and third viewpoint doesn't differ that much from the second viewpoint, and on the surface of it, they could have shown two extremes at how the rape itself took place.

But the reason that the rape is conveyed so similarly from both viewpoints is to emphasize the ambiguity of what actually happened. Yes, she was raped, but how much did she bring it on herself and did she actually enjoy it or want it? It is those ambiguous questions that made the final scenes so effective: the deflation of the woman after the final dual in comparison to her victorious husband, and the very final scene with the baby boy - obviously the son of the rapist - now not having a biological father. Or perhaps to emphasize that you can't have absolutely everything in world: stability, lust and happiness?

Although not brilliant on absolutely every count, I really liked the style, casting, acting, sets and depravity of this movie. It is very well shot, depicted and downright medieval dirty.

Also, this is very similar to Kingdom of Heaven (2005), also by Ridley Scott, which is even better!

I watched Prisoners a few years ago and found it rather forgettable. Fortunately, I decided to watch it again, which changed my opinion.

Hugh Jackman is incredible. A bereft father who has lost his daughter to the unacceptable, who is determined to find the solution, no matter what. A role played to absolute perfection and I believed every minute of the father's personal plight, including the lengths he would go through in utter disbelief and grief. In fact, the entire cast is fantastic in Prisoners.

I particularly enjoyed the sinister, slow moving and bleak element of this movie, including the lack of realistic hope of saving the girls.

However, there are a number of things that I would change if I could make a Director's cut, such as explanation of how one of the girls managed to escape the house, which seemed to more convenient than anything else, and the implausibility (or even the need) to shoot the father in the leg before condemning him to the car pit. He "might survive 24 hours" before losing too much blood and certainly won't survive more than three days (without water), but was ultimately found alive, which marred the ending a bit.

But Prisoners is a really good watch in a misery-inducing enjoyable sort of way, which I appreciate much more than any minor niggles I may have.

The concept is great: survive the hunt for as long as possible and get paid an increasing amount of money for every hour survived.

So why doesn't the movie work? For all sorts of reasons.

Five hunters, of which there were a maximum of three in the game at any given moment, and sometimes only one or two. Why? The hunted prey gives out a location ping every hour, so why aren't all five taking part?

The ridiculous odds of being able to predict an exact location that the prey would head to is too implausible to be realistic. Not only that, but commandeering the church, making it inaccessible to the general public and knowing that the prey would go exactly to 'confession' was just too ridiculous. It reminded me of later Saw movies in which everything is pre-planned in reverse order. There comes a point where you just cannot predict that much. They tried to explain away the implausibilities through narrative, but that didn't make them any less implausible. And the stereotypical hoo-hah-hah villains were just plain annoying, especially the vicar hunter.

Also, the changing of the rules concerning firearms irritated me quite a bit. So, it's OK to riddle an entire gang with machine gun bullets to get to the prey, but not OK to kill the prey itself with a gun? Don't be ridiculous! If guns are not allowed, that's it; you can't just administer the final kill with a knife and say that's acceptable because it's not a gun. The gun was used to get to that point in the hunt.

Making things realistic and plausible seems less of an option in movies these days because of how fast they're being churned out, which is what spoiled this quite entertaining concept and movie considerably. If they had kept it simple, it could have been a great watch.

It was so inconsistent! The idea is to corner the prey through gradual pressure and take it down. So, why would you throw a knife in broad daylight at a fully populated train, smashing a window in the process? About 50 witnesses saw that. And walking through a shopping mall with a visibly giant hunting knife stuck in the prey's ribs? If you're going to throw knives and use uzis to eliminate entire gangs, why not just stick the knife in and run away?

And where were the cops at key moments? Having brunch? Oh, come on! You can't bribe or blind every cop in the city, surely? Nor were there any cops or security on the cruise boat, which just so happened to have a hunter conveniently dressed in waitress uniform onboard, on the off chance that a ticket would be stolen for the voyage by the prey? Come off it, you can't possibly predict such things.

Funnily enough, I found Most Dangerous Game to be quite entertaining, but am much more frustrated at all the little no-go areas that spiraled it into being a dud. You can't just explode an entire factory, hug your wife because you've survived to daylight and then walk into the sunset with 24 million in the bank! Well, you can, but only in movies.