CyberRax Reviews

The Fall Guy (2024)

Yeah... pretty bad.

[3/10 · 25 April 2024]

Here's my gripe with this movie: it's about 40 minutes too long, the pacing is all over the place and it has no idea what kind of movie it wants to be. It wasn't particularly funny, I chuckled about 4 times. It didn't really work as an action movie, because the bulk of the action takes place in the final 20 or so minutes, and the couple of fights and chases which come earlier are separated by long dull scenes of dialog. Sooooooooo much bland dialog. A chase scene which repeatedly cuts to people talking... and not in a funny or meaningful way. A scene where I though "They're talking about split screen, and this is shown to us in split screen, that's pretty neat"... but the scene kept on going and going without doing anything for the plot. I found myself looking at my watch and thinking "We're 30 minutes in, and virtually nothing has happened yet". That turned into an hour. Then 1 hour and 30. OK, now they're finally ramping up things. Yeah.

Blunt's is utterly wasted in this film. She could have been replaced by a faceless voice a'la "Bullet Train" and it would have made very little difference. Palmer was decent (didn't even recognize her right away), but she had only like 5 minutes of screen time. Taylor-Johnson did an OK job as the arrogant movie star whom Gosling's character doubles, but he was missing for half of the movie, so didn't really make up for the blandness of pretty much everyone else. And that includes Gosling. There were several well placed cameos, but those were too short to elevate the movie in any significant way.

As they're both adaptations of 80's TV shows where comedy mixes with action, then it's worth comparing "The Fall Guy" to 2010's "The A-Team". Yes, that movie is not well regarded, but frankly speaking it was way more entertaining than what I watched in the cinema today. The dialog was way tighter and served a purpose, the romantic interest wasn't just a pretty face, it fully embraced it's ridiculous premise and actually had charismatic main characters. All things which "Fall Guy" misses.

TL;DR: save your money and wait until the movie reaches streaming services. Then you can watch it while doing chores etc, and have the option to zone out during the many many many boring bits.

John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

"John Wick The Invincible" aka "Meh"

[5/10 · 5 March 2017]

Maybe I was having too high hopes for this movie, or maybe it's because I liked the original a lot and only recently re-watched it on DVD, but this movie was a let down.

So, let's count the negative.

1) John is invincible, which kills all suspense.

In the first "John Wick" we had a bad-ass guy who was an excellent shot, was very fast and had quite a lot of luck (and good friends). But when he got shot once, or was stabbed, he bled and had a doctor take a look at it.

How did the screenwriter turn him even more "bad-ass" in this sequel? He gave him a bulletproof jacket, had him get hit multiple times with cars, and take a rain of direct bullet hits without as much as blinking an eye. There's not a single scene in the whole movie where you'd think that John might not make it out alive.

2) faceless goons keep on coming, so killing them gets boring.

The beginning scene in the garage, and the long escape scene in Rome felt like a video game - one henchman, kill it, another henchman, kill it, another henchman, kill it, another henchman, kill it. on more henchman, kill it. And so on and so on. No imagination, no suspense.

3) pacing was way off.

The first movie nicely interleaved exposition and flashback scenes with intense action. Not so much here - we have a drawn out action scene in the beginning, then 30 minutes of exposition, then another badly overdrawn action scene, then some more exposition.

4) the "mythology" was not interesting, nor helpful.

In the first movie we had a a quiet assassin who worked with the Russian mafia, had made a number of connections during this time, tended to pay with special coins and knew a shady hotel which was used by criminals to get a good night's sleep. The second movie turns this setup into a full-blown "association of gangsters", who have unlimited resources, a council, their own underground messaging system, dedicated housing if several cities, presumably hundreds - if not thousands - of members (of which several dozen are professional assassins and, from the looks of it, have non-criminal day jobs) and random rules which have to be followed. Why do we need this?

5) revenge for revenge's sake. We have enough B-grade movies with that logic.

OK, so the first movie had this ridiculous premise of avenging a dead dog. Even the characters in the movie acknowledged that it was ridiculous. But a deeper meaning was attached to John's rampage and it made sense. It was about punishment for done deeds, not about whom those deeds had been done to. No so much in the current movie. It's just another generic "he tried to kill me, now I'll kill him" film.

6) it sort-of ruins the character of John Wick.

The first episode gave us a solitary elite assassin who wouldn't kill on the hotel's premise (contrary to ms. Perkins), most likely wouldn't kill his friends (unlike Dafoe's character, who seemingly would) and had pulled off an "impossible task" to gain his freedom. This sequel reveals that Wick will kill in the Continental if his grudge is big enough, will kill people he considers friends, the "impossible task" wasn't all his doing and that he's simply one of many-many-many gunmen who roam the land looking for a quick buck...

CONCLUSION:

All-in-all I'd sadly the movie is a weak rehash of the original and offered nothing that would explain the hype it's getting.

I'll most likely give it another shot when it comes out on DVD, but until then John Wick of 2014 gets my vote over John Wick of 2016.

Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005 Video)

Worst Hellraiser movie yet...

[4/10 · 23 September 2005]

Now, don't get me wrong: the movie by itself wasn't *that* bad, it was just horrible (no, not in *that* way) in the Hellraiser context. The problem, you see, is the following: the first half of the series (yes, even the 4th installment which most people dislike) were monster-movies - a mysterious box, a couple of evil looking beings that came with it, and a lot of unlucky people who came in contact with them - while "Inferno" and the rest have been turned into mind game movies, where people see things which may, or may not, be related to the box...

What we have in "Hellworld" is a genuine mediocre teen slasher: 5 young people, who were once dedicated players of the Internet based game "Hellworld" but are taking it cooler since the suicide of their fellow player, get invited to a big party. From the beginning things seem weird and soon our heroes start to die one by one... And that's it. Pinhead, once a scary creature from Hell, has basically been turned into a serial killer with minimum imagination. The whole "you dared to open the box, we came, now you'll be tortured for all eternity" is gone. It's quite obvious that this script wasn't written with Hellraiser in mind. It's actually a mystery why it was even made part of the series, when it'd worked quite nicely independently... It could have used more deaths though.

I have to mention two positive things about the movie: Lace (hey, it doesn't matter if it's a brilliant masterpiece or Z-class production when Lance is in it!) and the fact that everybody was familiar with the Hellraiser mythology (the main character Chelsea even mentions that cenobites could never attack her because she would never open the box... beside the fact that it's all just fiction).

But all in all I'd give it a 4 out of 10 - not enough deaths, lame story, has virtually nothing to do with the Hellraiser franchise, but the deaths were OK and Lace played along.

Sixteen Tongues (1999)

This is what cyberpunk is all about

[6/10 · 1 June 2005]

The story goes as following: in an SM hotel, where walls are full of porn ads and the TV screens porn the whole time, stay 3 different people, who all must deal with their problems. The first is Adrian, a cop who was severely injured in a blast. His skin was replaced with the material from the tongues of 16 people (hence the name of the movie). Because of this he can literally taste his own clothes and everything he touches. The second is a female hacker, Alik, who's constantly accessing the Web in search for information. Third - Alik's lover, the assassin Ginny. She must deal with the urge to kill and with the artificial clitorises that are situated under both eyelids making her orgasm every time she blinks.

In short: I liked it. If one can see beneath the adult rated surface and won't be repulsed by the huge amount of sexual images then what we've got is a very solid cyberpunk movie. It resembles to Gibson's stories - several different tales which become one in the end, the technology, as crazy as it is, is just a by-product, it doesn't strive the story. Not much happens, we just get to know the characters, get to see why they do the things they do.