sven-vanrompaey Reviews

The Batman (2022)

Distancing further from Batman

[5/10 · 25 March 2022]

As a movie, yes, Matt Reeves knows what he's doing. It looks and feels impeccable. But I'm here as a long-time Batman fan, and I simply hate the fact that the recent movies distance themselves further from what Batman used to be all about. It's no longer colorful, there isn't the slightest bit of humour to be found.

Nolan first brought us a modernized version of Batman and it's world which was already a bleak turn from the classic caped crusader, I never thought it would get worse...enter Matt Reeves to rip away the comic book of old from the children's hands and replace it with a depressing and dark take.

Batman used to be fun, exciting, something for children as well as for adults, but in this day and age movie makers and comic book writers seem hellbent on ripping away a hero kids can look up to.

Zack Snyder's movies were far from perfect in it's exectution, but they at least had the classic charm.

"The Batman" has none of that...An emo Bruce, a softspoken and dumber than nails Batman, a Riddler who wears a garbage bag and can't come up with one clever or challenging riddle, a trash Batmobile, no Wayne Manor or thrilling Batcave and a horendous Batsuit...this will be the Batman legacy... Cheer for the movie making, sure, but for Batman?

The Handmaid's Tale (2017–2025)

Let's be real here....

[5/10 · 18 November 2021]

The sole reason "The Handmaid's Tale" is thriving so well here is because of the times we're living in...that's it, it speaks to many groups, I get that. But from a storytelling aspect, a filmmaking point of view, this could've been handled much MUCH better... Elisabeth Moss' character is easily my most hated protagonist I've ever encountered in a series. I couldn't possibly care less for June and secretly hoped she would fail in all her endeavours, which, she all claimed stemmed from her brilliant mind... Moss' portrayal didn't help either, the directing of said character didn't help either. The moving slowly, thinking even more slowly, the staring, the smirk, the grin,...it was so annoying, irritating to the point this whole show felt like an unrealistic goofy drama. The showmakers were most definitely not aiming for that. There's no way that a person would act or behave the way June does with all that's at stake...

I can't stress this enough, June, Offred or whatever...worst character in a drama series...ever.

History of Swear Words (2021)

Cage is probably the best thing about this...

[4/10 · 13 January 2021]

It's mind-boggling that linguistic experts, professors, whatever, already had the very first swearword of this show wrong.... That it comes from a Dutch word which means getting smacked...? How...wh...why?...What? Dutch is my native language....and that's not a thing...

However, the word does come from Europe and/or Scandinavia. The Dutch word for "breeding" for instance is "Fokken", a German word for intercourse is "ficken"...Unbelievable that these experts never picked up on that...

So yeah...I was basically done with this show right there.

But it gets worse...Thans the Gods Nicolas Cage was there...

Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion's Revenge (2020)

1995 movie with Scorpion background?

[2/10 · 18 May 2020]

Enough "blood" and "gore" to go around, albeit, a bit goofy and cartoonish looking. Not the biggest fan of the art and animation style. They did their best to make it look like a quality anime feature, but failed. "Scorpion's Revenge" is the title, but the story quickly took a different and longer turn, focussing more on Earth realm's tournament contestants Liu Kang, Sonya Blade and Johnny Cage. It all felt way too familiar from that point on as if I was watching an animated version of the 1995 live-action movie, borrowing many...MANY of that movie's plot. Scorpion faded into the background for the greater part of the movie, to eventually...have his revenge.

Dracula (2020)

Horryfyingly horrendous...

[3/10 · 4 January 2020]

A good start for about 30 minutes in the firs episodes....then, everything falls flat...

It brings a mixture of elements from classic Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee movies and a fair chunck of Nosferatu, sprinkled with childish, teenage Twillight dullness all over....

*sigh*

The acting is....laughable. Was this meant to be a comedic series? Were they trying to be serious?? It's all over the place..... Whoever wrote this, and I'm not talking about the source material obviously, but whoever wrote this script, the dialogue, must be an early teen... Silly, uninspired banter and one liners performed by actors who overexaggerate to the point it just.....gets ridiculous and cannot possibly take this show serious.

The special effects.....ooooh, the special effects.....Maybe if the show was actually in black and white, you wouldn't notice....

So here's a tip... If you're a fan of Dracula, it's lore, it's source material and the classic movies...Stay as far away from this show as possible.

If you're a fan of the Twillight series? This will be right up your alley.

Wu-Tang: An American Saga (2019–2023)

Wu-Tang: An American Saga Is For The Children

[8/10 · 27 October 2019]

As a die-hard fan from the get go, I've been wanting something like this forever.

Unfortunately it did not deliver, but, points for making a well paced bio-pic. Bio-pics tend to cram way too much information into 90 - 120 minutes, while this is the way it should be handled.

While the show looked good and was fairly well written, the one major flaw to me was the cast and the acting. A true Wu-Tang fan wouldn't get over the poor...POOR casting choices of some of the members. Our lead, RZA, Prince Rakeem, Bobby?....what a swing and a miss. Ashton Sanders didn't really seem to care too much about this role and was the only one who didn't even came close to replicate the mic skills of the clan member he was portraying. In an interview I saw with him, he came clean about not even knowing Wu-Tang Clan, he heard of'm, but that's about it.... And it was clear to me that he didn't do one bit of research for this part, and it annoyed me so much, because it showed.

Good casting choices? Divine. That was spot on. Kudos.

Spoiler alert!

I wished, thought, and hoped that the show would at least show the Clan pick the fruits of their labor....One more episode would've sufficed, but they stopped it when it was finally gonna be interesting, music-wise.

No love for Masta Killah and U-God??? How are you gonna make a Wu-Tang origin story, and not include the fact that Killah Priest was supposed to have Masta Killah's spot.....

Will there be a second season? I guess not since it's a mini series....such a shame....

Dark Side of the Ring: The Last of the Von Erichs (2019) Season 1, Episode 4

Would have benfited from a docu on grander scale.

[8/10 · 8 August 2019]

By far the most touching, gut wrenching episode of them all. Seeing Kevin, the last of the Von Erich brothers, talking about his family's tragedy, getting emotional about it once again, was so very moving.

This episode would have definitely benefited from being spread over 4 if not 5 episodes. Now it feels very rushed. They barely touched on the family's first tragedy, the death of the oldest brother Jack in 1959.

Much respect to Kevin Adkisson. After all the tragedies he's gone through, he's still standing and found happiness...

Baptiste (2019–2021)

The brilliance of "The Missing" = Missing.

[1/10 · 27 June 2019]

The writing and directing is some of the most uninspired, unoriginal I've ever witnessed. "The Missing" seasons 1 & 2 were brilliant, and I was hoping for more of the same top quality...But unfortunately...we got this. The dialogues itself are enough to make you cringe. On the level of an average soap opera I'd say...a bad soap opera. The story is something we've seen a million times, ok, but if at least the acting would have been decent.... Not even our lead Tchéky Karyo gave a convincing performance, and at times it even looked like he didn't even care. Karyo is surely not to blame, but the incompetent director is.

Plot holes, inconsistencies, dumb decisions and flaws across the whole thing made this one hell of a pain to sit through... As a comedy show, it was great, because my wife and I sure laughed out loud a lot.

Oh, and, I myself am from Belgium.... There's Belgian actors in here aswell....they shouldn't have done that....also the "creator" of this show....= Belgian....There's a reason Belgium hasn't produced anything worth mentioning internationally. It shows, I'm sad to say so, but it shows....hard.

The Walking Dead: The Calm Before (2019) Season 9, Episode 15

Faith restored?

[10/10 · 26 March 2019]

After losing all faith in the Walking Dead...they drop the most powerful episode yet...

Faith restored? .... Maybe, if this is the kind of production they're sticking with...yes.

Superior Donuts (2017–2018)

PC killed it....

[4/10 · 2 December 2018]

They've learned one thing after season 1. Getting rid of the bad apples. And that they did, too bad that wasn't the only thing making the show unwatchable.

Political Correctness simply killed this show.

Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017)

The best for true and devoted fans of the franchise!

[10/10 · 20 December 2017]

Star Wars: The Last Jedi did everything right. All the negativity on the internet is absolutely appalling and those negative nancys who call themselves Star Wars fans and write these rediculous childish reviews should not be allowed to do so.

Here's what I read in most of these "reviews":

-Bad writing, pointless relationships, too many new stuff, nothing happened what I expected, bad cgi (???), long and tedious first half etc....

Funny enough....those same people criticised The Force Awakens for being too much of the same...

It's this whole new generation of Star Wars "fans" who just recently learned to know about the series and now ruin it for everybody else, the true fans. And on the other hand there's the older generation who also despised the prequel trilogy for being way to different than the originals. Just rewatch those originals over and over if you can't handle change...

And now we're here, with The Last Jedi. A Star Wars movie that changes the game. It's true....I also had many expectations of things I thought were gonna happen, and nothing did...and that's one of the main reasons I love it so much. It surprised me over and over again. The movie does build up slowly, but that's a good thing, because the second half will have you sitting on the edge of your seat for the rest of the duration. All the CGI beauty flaws we saw in Force Awakens have been fixed to perfection. How they handled Carrie Fisher's character after her passing was beautiful and Mark Hammill has given us his best acting performance ever.

Also Daisy and Adam were fantastic, their on-screen chemistry was a thing of beauty.

Now here's one of the favorite nitpicks of the critics (spoiler ahead)

-SPOILER-

This one concerns the Force. Something new has been introduced in The Last Jedi and that is, what I would like to call, Force Projection, and another one I'd like to call, Force Telepathy.

During the movie Kylo Ren and Rey can see eachother, talk to each other and even touch eachother while being apart. This was a new experience for both the character aswel. They did not know what was going on and neither did the audience.

At another point in the movie we see Luke arriving at the rebel base and handing over a charm to Leia. I emediatly noticed Luke was looking younger then when we previously saw him. He didn't have grey hair, his hair was also shorter and overall looked younger. When he confronts Kylo Ren and his troops, Ren commands his troops to open fire on Luke and Luke allone. What follows is a barage of lasers being fired at luke. But Luke comes out unharmed and dusts of his shoulder (funny). What follows is Luke taking out his old blue lightsaber and a lightsaber duel between him and Ren takes place. When Ren delivers, what seems to be, the finishing blow, his lightsaber just passes through Luke not doing any harm. The next shot we see old Luke still on his island in a meditative state, collapsing shortly after.

That was marvelous, and it added so much more to what using the force can actually do.

The attention of detail during this entire scene is something only real Star Wars fanatics will pick up on. And i'm not gonna go in depth about this particular detail. I'm just gonna applaud Rian Johnson for that and the realest fans will have picked up on it.

It's not because what we, the audience, have seen what the force can do in previous movies, that that's just it. I love this bit of originality and makes me extremely curious for what's more to come.

It's sad that people nowadays can't handle any kind of change and feel the need to ruin an experience for the rest. All the hate The Force Awakens received for being too much of the same now pales in comparison with the hate for too much of new stuff with The Last Jedi.

That's all I have to say about the whole matter.

No Retreat, No Surrender (1985)

So bad that it's pure GREATNESS!!

[8/10 · 5 August 2016]

A lot is wrong with this movie. From the bad acting to the visible microphones and matte boxes to the failed sound editing. But still....this is one of the greatest fighting movies out there! Everything that went wrong producing this movie, the fight choreography made up for! Movie makers today can still learn from this! And not to forget, a magnificent, yet underrated soundtrack, and Jean-Claude Van Damme, the big action hero we know and love today, get's his first real screen time as "bad guy" Ivan! I have no idea why Kurt McKinney never had any major roles after this movie. A shame, would've loved to see him in action some more!

A must see for fight-movie fans and of course for the 80s nostalgia!

The Legend of Tarzan (2016)

Tarzan: A lack of everything

[1/10 · 11 July 2016]

I can probable sum it up in one word, but let me give it a try.

Wasn't expecting much going in this movie, but I was hoping to be surprised. Unfortunately...This is without a doubt the worst movie from 2016. The acting: Horrible. Not even Oscar winner Christopher Waltz, who was once again typecast to play the same role he always does. Dito for Samuel. And Skarsgard? Sorry to say he's the male equivalent of Kristen Stewart. If he would've had fangs he could've easily been Eric Northman 200 years prior to True Blood. Margot Robbie was probable the best thing about this movie....Or maybe the baby elephant, that's still up for debate

The movie wasn't even visually stunning, tons of CGI, which is understandable to some degree, but this was just ridiculous. I didn't count one real-life animal, and this including a butterfly.

The whole plot felt (and was) rushed and important moments where brushed aside as filler. There was absolutely no emotion what so ever between any of the characters, nothing memorable about the entire movie, except maybe for the poorly executed finale which I will only remember as a good laugh.

And that's about it...

Intruders (1992)

Underrated masterpiece!

[10/10 · 24 October 2012]

"Intruders" is in my opinion the most underrated masterpiece when it comes to the topic of UFOs, alien abduction etc.... I gave this movie a well deserved 10!

Of course, a lot of mistakes where made in the movie which you can clearly see, but no other movie has ever come this close to put down a realistic feel concerning alien abduction.

The special effects used in the movie are stunning for it's time and for it's budget.

I rediscovered this movie after 20 years, and as a kid, this movie truly got to me, and 20 years later it still does.

"ET" or "Close encounters" never had that effect on me.