Ursa Guy's Film Reviews

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Fifty Shades of Grey:


We as a society are about two months away from watching Fifty Shades of Grey be declared an Academy Award nominee. As painful as it might seem to have that distinction on a sticker on the DVD cover or in the trailer for the upcoming sequel, Fifty Shades of Grey has one of the best soundtracks of the year. It almost certainly will, and in my opinion it should, be recognized for that. 3 pop stars contributed original songs: Sia's Salted Wound, Ellie Goulding's Love Me Like You Do, and The Weeknd's Earned It. I love all of these, especially the last one, and the latter two both charted in the top 5 in radio airplay and sales. The soundtrack is further helped by Beyonce's dedication to remixing some of her old songs to fit the tone and tempo that the film is going for, best done for Crazy In Love. This will get more awards recognition than critical hits like Ex Machina, It Follows, and Mission Impossible. Accept it now to avoid frustration later.

In spite of being that movie adapted from that Twilight fanfiction that's basically porn, which everybody decided to hate without watching it, Fifty Shades is a passable film. The thirsty housewife audience of the books might be disappointed with the relative tameness and lack of spectacle. The story of billionaire Christian Grey seducing student Anastasia Steele for his BDSM desires remains mostly intact (I'm assuming, having never read the books), but everybody keeps their clothes on for the entire first third of the movie. Grey is never shown naked below the chest. Sex takes up maybe 10 minutes of the 2 hour run time. What happens in between those scenes is a mediocre drama that has quite a few points of merit and does not deserve the critical thrashing it received.

As you could probably expect being a romance movie, there are 2 actors who get anything to do. Dakota Johnson is actually quite good as Anastasia, or at least as good as the script allows her to be. She has some good expression acting, using scared glances and lip bites to convey layers that author of the books and writer of the screenplay EL James isn't smart enough to. I think she has a future in serious roles, and this gave her a lot of money, so some good definitely came out of this film. Jamie Dornan as Christian is a lot less proficient. He has one tone of voice no matter what situation he finds himself in. He sounds stiff when delivering his lines, like a male Siri system or an English dubbing of a foreign person talking on the news. The most important part of a romance movie is the chemistry between the two leads, so one of the worst parts of this movie is their complete lack of any. Anastasia never feels like she's happy, and honestly Christian makes whipping her sound more like a job than a fun distraction. You could argue that might be his character as the work-obsessed rich man, and so it is only natural that his persona in the board room would carry over to the bedroom, but it isn't enjoyable to watch.

I'm hesitant to blame Dornan too much because this script is just atrocious. To put things simply, EL James has no idea how to write dialogue. I'm not even sure what she's trying to do sometimes. I'll hear a line and wonder whether that was intended to be funny or hot, because whichever it was it failed miserably. The lines are bad in a variety of ways, too. A lot of the romantic lines are bad because they're so cliched. There's a "look at me!" "I am!" exchange, guaranteed to force an audible groan out of any viewer. A lot of the 'deep and complex' one liners are bad because they are the stupidest thing ever put on a page and will probably earn many unintentional laughs. "Why are you changing me?" "You're the one that's changing me" was a riot. "Rope and tape? Ha, you're the complete serial killer" immediately followed by a 100% serious "Not today" is hilarious. "I'm fifty shades of ****ed up" is an incoherent mess of a line that has absolutely no real meaning if you think about it, which makes it an awesome line destined to be shouted back at midnight screenings in an over the top voice. In some ways these bad lines help the movie out. My rating is based almost entirely on how much I enjoyed a movie. That's why The Room is my favorite movie ever made. Intentional or not, I had more fun laughing at this than I had laughing with most recent comedies. The worst lines, or the bad lines I enjoyed the least, were the constant telling of character traits instead of showing. Christian does nothing in their first encounter. I'm still trying to get a feel for his character. Anastasia tells us as an audience that "He was polite. Intense. Smart. Very intimidating." Her roommate is an exposition machine in the sense that she only exists for Anastasia to give exposition to. It's nice to establish everything there is to know about his personality in 5 seconds, but it's fun to be challenged. Sometimes it can be a good thing to let Christian's actions express his intelligence and intensity instead of giving us the SparkNotes summary.

The movie's real problems come in the middle hour. All of the funny lines come in the beginning or ending, and the middle act is repetitive nonsense that fails to move the story forward in any way. The middle is also the longest part, taking up more than half of the movie, forced to adjust from a rushed ending made to set up the sequels. Christian does something creepy or acts like a stalker, Anastasia has internal doubts but goes with it, they have sex, Anastasia hates him. This 20 minute cycle gets to happen 3 times, and even the ending is basically this with some more things happening around it as bells and whistles. As much as I would like to play it up as a future cult movie, I think it's too boring to get played at those midnight showings. It's bad storytelling for sure. This is a personal preference, but I would usually rather watch an actively bad movie with a lot of things happening than a boring one. The former is something to talk about, at least.

The production values are surprisingly okay. It is well shot. The cinematography was done by two time Oscar nominee Seamus McGarvey. I think even people who hate this film with a passion will concede that it looks nice. The production design is competent. Nothing stands out, but that means nothing was especially cheesy. It could have easily skimped on the budget and looked like porn, but it is presented like a legitimate movie. The sound and lighting crew put a lot of effort into making this technically decent. I'm not sure how much of the target audience for a Fifty Shades of Grey adaptation cares about sound design, but this looked like a serious film, in a stark contrast to the Lifetime-esque world of Nicholas Sparks' adaptations. This isn't a movie that I would watch again, nor is it one I would recommend that other people watch, but its bad reputation is mostly undeserved. Other than the pathetic excuse for a script there's nothing really wrong with this film, and a few things worked well. I can't go as far as to call it a good movie, but I think "underrated" describes it quite well.



Damn, that's one hell of a surprise rating for one of this year's most hated films...

Given I have not seen it, so I can't really judge, but I have heard next to nothing great of it - except from horny females. I have no interest in ever watching it either, but cool that you did and kind of liked it.



Great review, Ursaguy.
The worst lines, or the bad lines I enjoyed the least, were the constant telling of character traits instead of showing.
That's one of the biggest movie sins. Characters should be revealed by their thoughts, actions and behavior, not described by dialogue. Viewers should be able to form their opinions about characters like they form opinions in real life. Spelling out removes possible complexity and difference of opinions about characters and evaluations among viewers.


To the extent "Fifty Shades of Grey" manages to reveal who Christian and Anastasia are,- it is good, to the extent it spells out to us,- it fails. Other than that, you are right about technical side of the move and soundtrack being good.


I'd say the movie was alright, better than IMDB rating would suggest.



Survivor 5s #2 Bitch
Great review! I really hope "Love Me Like You Do" gets a nomination regardless of the credibility of the film, that song managed to describe their relationship far more persuasively and poetically than E.L. James ever could.
Besides, the song categories have had a lot of crappy films get a nom, like Pearl Harbour and Mannequin

I agree about IMDb too, the ratings there are hugely inconsistent



Damn, that's one hell of a surprise rating for one of this year's most hated films...

Given I have not seen it, so I can't really judge, but I have heard next to nothing great of it - except from horny females. I have no interest in ever watching it either, but cool that you did and kind of liked it.
I feel like the perception of it shaped my opinion to an extent. If the general reaction was that it was mediocre (which would be the word I would use to describe it), I might be more willing to say negative things. Because the reaction is awful, I'm sort of pushed into defending it as not that bad. Like I said, I think a lot of the bad buzz is based on principle: kinky sex, fanfiction, the reputation for attracting horny females, etc.




Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse:


At some point... I will be making a list of the X worst movies of this year, and it will take a really impressive failure to not let The Gallows sit at #1.
Well, that was a really impressive failure. It's okay, me from the past. You acknowledged that things could get worse. Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse (Which should really be Scouts' Guide, indicating that the scouts possess the guide, but there are bigger fish to fry than the grammar of the title) is about a trio of scouts and their stripper/"I'm not a stripper, I'm a cocktail waitress!!!" friend who have to fight an apocalypse of zombies. Through an impressive combination of obnoxious characters and sex jokes for 12 year olds, this film manages to be the most difficult to sit through thing I've sat through in a long, long time.

The movie stars Tye Sheridan (the kid from Mud and Tree of Life who should be able to do better than this), Logan Miller ("famous" in the loosest sense of the word from his work on the Disney Channel), and Joey Morgan as the scouts. Tye plays Ben, the generic protagonist with no personality. Joey plays Augie, the fat kid. He doesn't have much of a personality beyond being the fat kid. He is jolly, dumb, and immature, but he's trying so hard. Logan Miller plays Carter, the dick. I've been noticing this problem a lot lately in films with teenage casts, especially with horror movies. They all have one of the protagonists' friends be a completely horrible person who does nothing but bully others and make dumb sex jokes. The filmmakers want us to like, or at least tolerate, this person. This trend is getting really annoying. There is no reason why these awkward but goodhearted kids would ever want to be around somebody as obnoxious as Carter. These kids aren't awful actors, but I refuse to call any of them good. I don't expect character development from a horror-comedy, but the one note traits they assigned to these kids are protagonist, fat, and annoying. Only one of those is actually a trait that a person can have. The writing fails in many ways, but the biggest one is the non-characters we have to watch.

That's not to say the jokes are any better. Everything is either about sex or poop. They're basic jokes, too. These high school sophomores are reacting to sexual things like they have never seen them. Oh my god, panties! Boobs! A penis! There is nothing to say about these things, they just flash them onscreen and you're supposed to laugh. I guess the humor is supposed to come from it being zombies that are doing these things. A zombie is stripping! A zombie has a penis! The worst one is when the kids have to climb down a building and one needs to hold onto the zombie's penis to avoid falling. Carter is standing in back yelling helpful advice such as "Aw, dude, hold onto that dick bro." Singing Brittney Spears for no reason whatsoever obviously isn't funny. There is no inherent joke in singing Hit Me Baby One More Time. It doesn't get any funnier if it is a zombie that sings it. These jokes are a waste of time, and the ironic thing is that they don't actually spend that much time telling them. This is another "horror-comedy" that is really a comedy dressed up in a horror setting and never attempts to be scary, but all of the jokes are treated like set pieces. Nobody just says a funny line, they have to establish a situation, wait for zombies to enter it, and then solve their problem by means of a joke that lasts way too long. There is a lot of setup time. I think the writers (4, three rookies and the writer/director, who also wrote/directed Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones) knew this. It feels weird that the director of Paranormal Activity 5, quality aside a horror film, would go for this, clearly a comedy with a lighthearted atmosphere and a few halfhearted jump scares to make it look scary in trailers. The whole plot is essentially zombies taking over and the kids fighting them. There's a MacGuffin thrown in there, as they need to get to a party to save one of their girlfriends, but the whole thing is moving to a new location that they presume safe, waiting for zombies to get close to them, and then surviving with a deus ex sex joke. The film is less than 90 minutes without credits, and even at that it feels too long because of how far some scenes and jokes are stretched.

There isn't much consistency in how the zombies act. Some are homicidal maniacs that run after the first thing they see, some are incapable of running, some casually walk up to people and wait before making a move to kill them. Some zombies have the desires of a zombie, some have the desires of the person they were when they were alive. These things will change whenever the plot says so. If they need the kids to get trapped, the zombies are intense hunters. If they need a stupid joke, the zombie is riding a stripper pole. The tone also lacks consistency. It's a juvenile movie in many parts, which makes it so weird that this is a hard R-rated movie. There is constant swearing and a lot of gore. The 12 year olds probably can't watch this because of the vulgarity. I could complement the production values. The zombie effects look good, the score is fine, and the cinematography is bad but not horrible. But I'm not especially interested in saying positive things. The writing is too awful to tolerate, and far too awful to appreciate any of the decent elements. It might not be as poorly made as The Gallows, but I found it more annoying. Don't waste your time with this.





Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension:


To say absolutely nothing of meaning, Ghost Dimension is the best Paranormal Activity movie since 3. After a few dreadful installments in a series that never rose above mediocre, being not terrible is good enough for me, and honestly Ghost Dimension is not terrible. Is it well made? Not necessarily, but I enjoyed parts of it enough, and relative to other mainstream horror movies this year it comes out okay.

To address the elephant in the room, this is a Paranormal Activity movie. I thought the first was alright, the second was bad, the third was alright, the fourth was painful to watch, and the fifth was bad. Every sequel has had basically the same plot. A family moves into a house and their child gets possessed by the paranormal. The cinematography is always lazy, and the editing is always awful. Even the poster is the exact same. All of those things are still present in Ghost Dimension. Notably not present is Katie Featherston, the first time in the 6 film franchise in which she did not reprise her role as antagonist Katie. The signature creepy kid for this one is Leila, played by Ivy George, and to her credit she is creepy. Some neat CGI black eyes help her out with that vibe, but she plays her part fine for a kid.

I appreciate how little time the film spends waiting around for something to happen. That is usually a signature of the series, but pretty much immediately the characters are introduced, find the video footage from the previous movies, and set up cameras for the ghost to frolic in. The ghost still follows tradition by not doing much until halfway through the movie, but he moves objects in a spooky way before that. I also appreciate the relative lack of jump scares. There are a few, but only 3 or 4, and it doesn't end with one. The ghost moves with stealth, quietly crawling across the walls towards its targets. The sound effects on the whole are quite restrained. They have essentially given up the premise of this footage actually being found, but they did bother to keep the sounds realistic instead of throwing loud jump noises into it.

The visuals really impressed me, especially for its very modest $10M budget. The 3D is a total gimmick, but it's executed so well that I loved it anyway. It makes the movie creepier by a little, more fun by a lot, and it looks really impressive. Other people may have different preferences, but personally I love when stuff gets thrown directly at the audience. I do have a problem with how limited the usage of 3D was. If the ghost isn't on the screen, the 3D is out of order, so it only shows up for about 30 minutes. If you think that's a waste of money, that is completely fair, but it looks so pretty when it is used. The CGI of the ghost is nice, too, and I like how it moves. It has a sort of slither or glide to cross the house, instead of just moving in mid air.

The story took an almost interesting turn for the much hyped final chapter, which has basically no chance of actually being the last Paranormal Activity. It ties up some of the loose ends that previous movies in the series were too lazy to address. It has no way to fix every plot hole from the series, but it tries hard and solves most of the major problems. We finally get to see Toby. We learn that the entire time the ghost was an occult leader dedicated to recruiting little kids. That was pretty cool. The climax is nicely done. It tricks you into thinking that it's terrible, but at the very end a second climax happens involving Toby,
WARNING: "End of the movie" spoilers below
Who is now a human. He strangles the mother of Leila. This scene is the best done in the entire film, and maybe the entire series. The final scary thing happens, and there is absolutely no hint of a jump scare. Through lighting and atmosphere alone, director Gregory Plotkin creates a great mood as Toby slowly reaches down, grabs, lifts, and suffocates the mother.


As it tends to be, the characters are a problem. None of them are interesting in any way. I tend to blame horror movies for attaching a single trait to their characters, but a majority of this cast have no traits whatsoever. They are all interchangeable masses that take up space before they get killed off. None of them have a personality that makes me care that they get killed off. As such, the horror never actually gets scary, because I can't get an emotion beyond apathy to come out. They all make stupid decisions, all of their actions are contrived and many are unexplained, they refuse to move out of the house until it is far too late, and they hire a dumb religious guy who is blatantly incorrect in saying that the spirit is attached to the person and not the house.

As a person who doesn't even like the Paranormal Activity franchise, I thought this was a neat way to tie it all up. It's bad for a movie, but great for a Paranormal Activity movie. The positive tone of the review doesn't indicate that everyone will like it (Quite on the contrary, most people will hate it and so I needed a further explanation of why I considered it to be okay). If you have sort of liked any of the previous films, this is worth a rent on VOD, which it will be on early thanks to Paramount's consumer-friendly but financially failing new contract for their horror movies' release windows. If you've never watched one then the hole plugging will be lost on you, and if you hate them all (especially 3) this won't convert you, but it's a decent time.




The Boy Next Door:
Filmmaking Rating-

Entertainment Rating-


I will go on record as saying Rotten Tomatoes got this one wrong. They described The Boy Next Door as a ridiculous failure that "won't even rise to 'so bad it's good' status." I understand that film, and especially what makes a 'so bad it's good' film, is extremely subjective, but this was absolutely so poorly made and vapid that I got laughs out of it. This movie is about Jennifer Lopez being seduced by the boy next door, who seems perfect at first but becomes a homicidal psychopath when you get to know him. It's even less clever than it sounds.

First, the acting. Was there acting? Jennifer Lopez is awful, but that shouldn't come as a surprise. What did surprise me is that she wasn't as awful as Ryan Guzman, playing the titular boy next door Noah, or Ian Nelson, her son Kevin. I almost want to say that Nelson did the best with the awful script they handed him, but to be objective I cannot. He has this ridiculous scene where he gets angry at his dad and retaliates by driving their car at 80 MPH and squealing with a red face. I'm almost positive he was supposed to be crying, but he couldn't get any tears out. This kid has the most ridiculous mood swings ever, and like every character in this movie, is obnoxiously slow to realize that Noah is evil. Ryan Guzman checks off a couple of Wiseau boxes in his performance. He steals most of the scenes he's in, and it very rarely requires corny dialogue, although rookie writer Barbara Curry gives it her best effort. He gets a scene where he tries to rape Lopez but gets kicked in the crotch area and pushed off. He jumps about 4 inches into the air after getting hit, for no reason whatsoever. He basically bites down and talks through his teeth in one scene in which he harasses his school's vice principal (Kristin Chenoweth, who should really stick to Broadway). He regularly quotes Homer's The Illiad as he is beating or even killing people, and he uses this ridiculous theater voice for it, trying to make sure the back rows can hear him. He also gives Lopez a first edition copy of The Illiad. For you Greek history fans, that book was written about 3,000 years ago. The English first edition was written at least 400 years ago. There is no practical way a first edition copy of that book exists.

The plot is on its own plane of stupidity. The film could end in 10 minutes if Lopez were to do something logical like call the police. It's not like the main plot of a high schooler stalking his 40 year old teacher can last for a full movie anyways, so we get filler and subplots! This might be a contender for the Kirk Cameron award for the most padded movie that's still under 90 minutes. Lopez gets in trouble once with her boss, the school's principle, named Ed Warren because Curry liked the Conjuring I guess. He yells at her for her poor behavior, but that never gets followed up on. There is a subplot where Kevin tries to get a date to a dance, which he does, and then his date has sex with Noah. Maybe. The internet says Noah got head from Kevin's date, and that makes sense in context, but they use a body double that barely resembles the character it is supposed to. The events are insanely unrealistic. Noah regularly breaks into the school where these people work at to spray graffiti in the bathrooms, print out hundreds of pictures of him having sex with Lopez, and tell off teachers, plus the raw stupidity of the scene where Kevin drives the car too fast and a climax that needs an in depth discussion later on. A lot of characters are wearing some useful plot armor. Noah beats up a bully by repeatedly slamming his head against a wall until he is bloody and unconscious, but who apparently survived with minimal injuries. There's no reason why he couldn't die, because that character is never mentioned again anyway, but we can't have anybody die before the third act. Lopez's cheating husband gets shot multiple times and lives with minimal injury because we can't hurt the good guys. Lopez always survives her troubles with no difficulties, because that might build a character, and we all know we can't have that in this movie. Nobody has a character. Noah is a 1 dimensional villain, Lopez is a 1 dimensional generic protagonist, and her husband is a 0 dimension plot device that lets Lopez say she has been cheated on and lets Kevin look for a new male role model.

The last ten minutes are what elevate this movie from terrible to so pathetically bad that I want to rewatch it more than plenty of movies I consider to be good. There are spoilers in this portion, because I'm just going to directly say what happens. You don't need me to tell you that it's bad or absurd. Make your own jokes. Noah has kidnapped Kevin and Lopez's husband, suspending them in midair tied by their wrists, in a barn. Lopez comes into the barn and gets into a standoff with Noah. Noah, using I kid you not a raspy Christian Bale Batman voice, makes generic threats and asks Lopez to marry her. She denies this offer, so Noah sprays gasoline all over the barn and gets out a match. Lopez tackles him, causing the match to drop and ignite a fire that stays restrained just on the gasoline spill and never gets closer to either of the trapped men. Lopez gets out her son's Epi-Pen and gouges out Noah's eyes with it. She pulls a lever and a metal engine drops from the top of the barn, crushing him. I don't even know how to describe my reaction to it. The most hammy possible cinematography is used to over-dramatize her stabbing him. Slow motion is used, the camera looks at the events from the side and then over Lopez's back, and an over the top blood splash ensues. It is one of the better eye gouge scenes I've sat through in my life. Why does the barn have a lever that drops a giant metal mass from the ceiling? That's a great question, and I really want an answer to it.

The production values don't exist. This is an R rated Lifetime movie, and it looks like it. The colors are bland, and the sound effects are all obvious stock effects that I've heard on TV before.The camerawork is trying way too hard to be overdramatic in more places than just the climactic showdown. The amateur visuals of the film make me wish they went a little bit further than they did in making a cheesy trainwreck. It isn't as consistently funny as some of the classic 'so bad it's good' movies, but it is worth your time at least once if you're looking for a good laugh. If you want to actually enjoy a dramatic erotic thriller, stay away from this. It is so obvious that nobody cared whether or not this film worked, and you shouldn't waste a valuable hour and a half or any money on witnessing it.




The Hunger Games: Mockingjay: Part 2


That is a brutal title to type. The second installment in the third installment in the popular YA Franchise, Mockingjay 2: Electric Boogaloo is the definitive example for why splitting a book into multiple parts is a bad idea. Harry Potter came out with an okay part 1 and a great part 2, and the Twilight conclusions were no worse than previous films. Financially, they were both very successful. The Hunger Games is the franchise that made multiple decent movies and then took a big dip in quality in the split films. Financially, Lionsgate's decision looks like it backfired. Mockingjay Part 1 got significantly less money than its predecessors, and Part 2 is doing even worse on its opening weekend, making it (as far as I am aware of) the only book series turned into a movie series in which the finale made the lowest amount of money. There is no reason why this had to be two movies, but at least in this part the cast and crew made the most of a studio order and churned out a passable, if forgettable film.

I will take the same approach of the film and not bother explaining things to people who haven't seen any of the movies or read any of the books. You won't watch it, which is good because you probably couldn't. To a fault, this film is incomprehensible if you don't know what will happen going into it. Because the film adaptation of the Mockingjay book is two parts, the writers get to tie up a lot of loose ends of subplots. Unfortunately, because the previous adaptations had just 150 minutes, you probably didn't know that most of these subplots existed. I was a huge vocal supporter of leaving out a lot of the love triangle garbage from the books in the first three movies, but the turmoil of Katniss choosing her boy is directly referenced multiple times in this movie. Finnick and Annie get married, which probably won't matter to movie only fans as they have had about 20 and 2 minutes of screentime in the saga respectively. That entire wedding scene, which goes on for a fair amount of time, could be cut out entirely and nothing changes. It has already been established that a lot of weird and unrealistic scifi things can happen in the world of Panem, but even within that context there are a few things that make no sense because they are too unrealistic. The opening scene picks up right where Mockingjay 1 ended, without any kind of recap or segway, so if you don't remember what happened at the end of that you will probably be confused.

As it has been throughout the franchise, the biggest item in favor of The Hunger Games is the acting. The supporting cast gets less emphasis than ever before, with Woody Harrelson and Elizabeth Banks getting only a couple of scenes each and my personal favorite Stanley Tucci appearing only on a video monitor, but all 3 are very good with what they're given. Jennifer Lawrence was fantastic in this film. I can't put together words to describe it. It won't get any awards nominations because of the title and budget, but quite honestly it should. This is the best I've seen her in years, and way better than her caricature overacting in American Hustle. A lot of my theater was making fun of her drooling at a certain part near the end, but I thought it was fantastic. Good on her for actually looking broken instead of pretty "Hollywood crying". Donald Sutherland has been menacing throughout the series, but the last hour of this film is the first time you see him vulnerable, and he is fantastic with it. Josh Hutcherson continues to step up his game as the series goes along, going from mediocre at best in the first movie to above average at worst in the last. Liam Hemsworth is also getting better. I still don't think he's very good, and he's not nearly as charismatic or attractive as the filmmakers want me to think he is, but it was the first time I've seen a performance from him that I can put above the Jai Courtney and Sam Worthington class. Sam Claflin finally gets to act, and he has one really great expression and he fits the bill as a good action hero while being serviceable in other dramatic scenes. I will concede that Julianne Moore was disappointing. She has the ability to be really great, but she obviously phoned this performance in. On the other side, Elden Henson surprised me as Pollux, the former capital slave that got his vocal cords ripped out as punishment. He expresses a lot of emotions with absolutely no dialogue, something very rarely seen in blockbuster movies.

This is not a great movie, but it is made up of some great scenes. The aforementioned emotional breakdown by Katniss is wonderful. Stanley Tucci's one scene is awesome. At one point the protagonist travel party has to go underground, and Hunger Games takes a 10 minute break to become Night of the Living Dead. That sequence is thrilling fun, shot brilliantly with some good CGI and skilled tension building that should make most modern horror directors jealous. The problem with the film is what is happening when a fantastic scene isn't playing, particularly because nothing important fills time in between. The peaks are among the highest I have ever seen in a blockbuster book series adaptation, and certainly the highest class of the YA dystopian genre. The other hour and a half is boring, and it could have been pressed down into 10 minutes in a nearly 3 hour movie combined with the last one. Katniss doesn't even get into the capital until the start of the second act. She spends that entire second act getting near death, surviving but letting Snow think she's dead, and being seen to put her back on the kill list. In true Hunger Games fashion, the third act is split up, with the first part being a traditional third act and the second part being the zillion endings of Return of the King. There is a quiet and nice place where the movie obviously should end, the screen fades to black, and then it keeps going, even though the actual final scene is horribly inconsistent with the tone of the 2 hours you just watched.

The editing was poor to help pad out the run time. Basically every scene was 30 seconds longer than it had to be. We don't need to see a minute of hovercrafts taking off. We don't need to see a minute of Katniss walking with a crowd behind her. We don't need to see an explosion burn for a minute. If we were just showed the last 5 seconds of these shots, we could understand what happened and it would help out the awful pacing. Ironically, a major death is rushed out of obligation and glossed over. I barely even realized who had died, which is a problem, because that death is the catalyst for every aspect of the film that follows it. The only thing worse than a slow and boring movie is a slow and boring movie in which there is an easy fix to make it not slow and boring, which was to cut time and focus on the characters instead of the spectacle.

The dark tone of this movie is definitely dark. Everything is gloomy, and other than that out of place ending which I will pretend does not exist, there isn't much in the way of a happy resolution. Katniss and Peeta move from anger to acceptance in their depression phases, but they clearly do not get better. Most of the District 12 team that you might have learned to love gets a somber ending. Most of them end up with a job that sort of resembles what they wanted at the start, but with all hope drained out of them, and they all lose contact with Katniss, most of them on bad terms. A romance between Effie and Haymitch is implied, which did not exist in the book and is not consistent with either character, but if a male and female are around the same age they have to get together. That's the closest thing to happiness you can expect from this. This isn't making that Catching Fire money for a few reasons, but an obvious one is that this isn't really an enjoyable viewing experience. Parts of it are very enjoyable, but this is the type of movie that I will call well made without liking a whole lot, and that becomes an issue when it is not on an Oscar level of filmmaking. There isn't anything to form a positive emotional connection to. It's not uplifting or fun like most summer blockbusters, and it's certainly not an easy casual watch on a rainy day the way something like a Furious 7 or Avengers 2 is, even if I think Mockingjay 2 is objectively a better film than either.

The criteria for recommendation is simple. If you have watched the other 3 Hunger Games movies and thought they were at least okay (or you're one of those people that think it would be okay if it was rated R and resent bloodless, consequence-less action, or even if you liked the first two and were massively disappointed by the third entry), watch it knowing that this is better than the first Mockingjay. If you absolutely loathe the others in the series, this won't change your mind. If you haven't seen all of the previous movies, I don't know how you can figure out the plot of this. All in all, The Hunger Games escaped the arena with dignity, even if it was weakened by its time in the fight.



Survivor 5s #2 Bitch
I don't think it helps that as a book, Mockingjay took forever to get going and even then I found it quite weak, to be honest I thought none of the books were superb. I really do think this is one of the very few, rare occasions where the film adaptations are superior to the original sources, and that is, quite like you said, because of the acting.

In other words, I'd choose Battle Royale, novel or film, any day

Another great review though ursaguy! This was really interesting to read!



I don't think it helps that as a book, Mockingjay took forever to get going and even then I found it quite weak, to be honest I thought none of the books were superb. I really do think this is one of the very few, rare occasions where the film adaptations are superior to the original sources, and that is, quite like you said, because of the acting.

In other words, I'd choose Battle Royale, novel or film, any day

Another great review though ursaguy! This was really interesting to read!
I try to talk about movies on their own merits, but yes the elephant in the room is that the source material isn't very good. That said, I still think Catching Fire is an amazing movie and thought the book was a lazy duplication of the first, so bad source material can't be an excuse. If they were willing to change some things and use the added time to expand on characters we barely saw in the books, it could have turned out better than it did.



I have to return some videotapes.
The last ten minutes are what elevate this movie from terrible to so pathetically bad that I want to rewatch it more than plenty of movies I consider to be good. There are spoilers in this portion, because I'm just going to directly say what happens. You don't need me to tell you that it's bad or absurd. Make your own jokes. Noah has kidnapped Kevin and Lopez's husband, suspending them in midair tied by their wrists, in a barn. Lopez comes into the barn and gets into a standoff with Noah. Noah, using I kid you not a raspy Christian Bale Batman voice, makes generic threats and asks Lopez to marry her. She denies this offer, so Noah sprays gasoline all over the barn and gets out a match. Lopez tackles him, causing the match to drop and ignite a fire that stays restrained just on the gasoline spill and never gets closer to either of the trapped men. Lopez gets out her son's Epi-Pen and gouges out Noah's eyes with it. She pulls a lever and a metal engine drops from the top of the barn, crushing him. I don't even know how to describe my reaction to it. The most hammy possible cinematography is used to over-dramatize her stabbing him. Slow motion is used, the camera looks at the events from the side and then over Lopez's back, and an over the top blood splash ensues. It is one of the better eye gouge scenes I've sat through in my life. Why does the barn have a lever that drops a giant metal mass from the ceiling? That's a great question, and I really want an answer to it.
This might possibly be the best paragraph I have ever read on MoFo, and I really want to see this movie now that you said that. Thank you so much ursa




Taken 3:


Tak3n: The movie so bad it stopped T4ken from being made. I'm not sure if I can think of a franchise that deserved to be a franchise less than the Taken movies. Maybe this is just my thoughts, but I think what a lot of people forget is that the first Taken wasn't a groundbreaking cinematic achievement. It was good. It was a fun action movie to distract us from how terrible January and February movies are and nothing more. We get one of those nearly every year. It's probably the first movie ever to be marketed by a quote, as the monologue featured in the trailers was quoted by a lot of people who never saw the film for years to come. The first film was directed by Pierre Morel, not a visionary by any stretch, but he knew how to hold a camera. In both sequels he was replaced by Oliver Megaton, who does not.

Regardless of all other elements which may or may not work, Taken 3 was dead on arrival because it was an Oliver Megaton action movie, which in itself should be considered a paradox. The point of an action movie is to watch action. The point of Oliver Megaton's work is to give you an epileptic seizure by flashing half a second of various shots strung together, ensuring that you can never see what's actually happening. There are numerous (read as all) fight scenes where I had no idea what was happening until it was over. That's not a recipe for effective action filmmaking. If I cannot see the action, it is not compelling, and its existence becomes pointless. Even in static dialogue scenes the camera work is appalling. It's always shaking, always cutting, and always physically moving, usually by a spin. Even if it did look good, it would get repetitive because every scene is visually set up in the same way. The CGI is quite bad, too, and the whole thing contributes to creating a movie that's painful to look at.

The characters are poorly written, often breaking their previously established traits within the franchise. Stuart St. John, the recast husband of Liam Neeson's ex-wife, becomes a full villain. In the first two films, he was annoying and unhelpful, but never became a main antagonist. It doesn't make sense that his character would do this. Liam Neeson's star Bryan Mills was usually likable in the first two Taken movies. He's just not here, and that is a huge hurdle that I cannot get over. Action heroes regularly kill faceless hoards of Eastern Europeans, and the good ones are still likable. Characters like John Wick could be morally reprehensible, but you take some enjoyment in their fights because they have a reason for their actions. Neeson has no motivation for his actions beyond needing to move the plot forward. There is obvious video evidence that he is innocent of the murder he is framed for in the first half of the film. The audience and most of the characters know that he is innocent. He proceeds to spend the next hour causing over a hundred thousand dollars in property damage and at least 50 civilian injuries, plus a few assumed casualties. He also waterboards and poisons people who are on his side anyway to get them to work with him. By the end of the movie, the audience is forced to confront the fact that Neeson absolutely is a bad person who has no regard for humanity and should be jailed for more than a few crimes. He claims to be a family man and is the worst person in the world at keeping his family safe. The plot itself makes no sense whatsoever, throwing in way too many turns for its own good. It is confused about who the villain is, giving Neeson three antagonists even though by the end of the film one of them did not antagonize him and one of them never interacted with him.

I watched the R rated extended edition because I heard that the PG-13 theatrical cut was incomprehensible with its sloppy editing. That doesn't get any better in the uncut version. It felt very awkward to sit through, because it still looked like a movie desperately avoiding an R for violence even though it easily earned its R for language anyways. Maybe it was intentionally done to hide Liam Neeson's age, as it has become painfully apparent that he does not have the same speed as he used to, but it was annoying and distracting.

The lone thing that saves Taken 3 from the half star is the acting. Liam Neeson is still an awesome action star, and he is convincing as a tender family man. Forrest Whitaker gave effort in 2015, and that's an achievement in itself. His character is a cliche, but he plays the part well. Maggie Grace is fine as his daughter, who gets dramatic beats to hit after playing a damsel in distress and rushed action star in the first two. Still, none of these performances are great, and they don't make Taken 3 an enjoyable waste of time. This is a poorly made film, stripped away of all of its fun that doesn't come back for the "unedited" version. It's not even worth a free watch on HBO. Neeson can do much better, and Megaton needs to stop trying.



I have to return some videotapes.
Taken 3 looked awful.

By the way, do you know a video of the eye gouging scene? I really want to watch it lol.





War Room:


Put on your Sunday clothes and bust out some Coney Bombs, it's Kendrick brother time! Despite not being religious and thinking the Christian movie boom is the worst thing to happen to film as a medium this decade, I'm a mild fan of the Kendrick brothers. They're a name brand, the Nicholas Sparks of faith films, known for packing production values that look like they belong on a cinema screen and positive messages in a genre notably lacking in those elements. In many ways, this film packs a lot of Kendrick touches. In a few key ways, it runs away from their traditions, and they make the film worse for it. As per usual, the film is centered around a struggling marriage, with the added layer of a daughter who feels neglected by both her mom and her dad.

To the target audience, the most important part of the movie is the religious aspect, and it typical Kendrick fashion it is handled well. It is preachy in parts, and unlike their best film Fireproof the movie is definitely about God instead of featuring him, but it preaches good morals. It's about loving people and helping people, even if you don't like them. That should be an obvious message, but it's a welcomed relief from the PureFlix house style in which Christians are all being prosecuted by evil, militant atheists who must be killed or converted by the end of the run time. There's a mean boss of the company that the husband in this film works for. It would have been so easy for him to hate the husband because he is an atheist and despises all who love God, and it would have been so easy for him to die in a car crash, but he fires the husband for a practical reason and gets a flat tire, with no reference whatsoever to his religion. That's something that might happen to a real person, who has desires and conflicts beyond a petty religious scuffle. Characters don't fight other characters, they fight against themselves, and it turns what could have been a frustrating sermon into a well-meaning one. I do think that the Kendricks blow their moral by making the relationship too broken. The husband character does get redeemed by the end, but they go too far in making him unlikable in the beginning. He abuses and cheats on his wife. At that point his wife should be looking to a divorce, not the bible. I understand that they're trying to say that faith can save any relationship, no matter how painful, but frankly I disagree with the premise of that. The relationship goes from terrible to perfect in an unrealistically short amount of time.

The biggest thing I have against this film is the scattershot plot. I guess it technically follows a three act structure, but those acts are really rigid, and the events inside of them are really fluid. There are 50 minutes of the relationships falling apart, 50 minutes of them coming back together, and 20 minutes of a double-dutch jump rope competition. Yes, that third act has as little to do with the first two as you probably think. Within those acts, I don't think I could put the events into order. The husband does something dumb, the wife meets with helpful religious lady Miss Clara and prays, and a repetitive cycle of those two things ensues. The wife must go to the titular war room at least 5 times during the movie. I'm not sure where the pressure to make this movie two hours came from, because this easily could have been done in 90 minutes. There is a lot of filler included throughout, including multiple scenes revealing the backstory of Miss Clara, multiple scenes in which the daughter prepares for her jump rope competition, and far, far too many scenes of people complaining about the smell of the wife's feet. I think that was supposed to be a running joke, but it was never funny.

As is typical of the Kendricks, the acting is decent, which gets inflated to amazing on the indie religious movie scale. The lead couple, played by T.C. Stallings and Priscilla Shirer, have to carry most of the film alone, and they do that adequately. The side character acting is usually fine, except for one hilariously bad scene in which the wife and Miss Clara are threatened by a man with a knife who drops it in the name of Jesus. The Chris R scene in The Room is the best comparison I can come up with. I don't expect JD Banks to pop up in a wide release film ever again, but if he does remember that he was always an awful performer. The visual look is fine. It's a little too shaky for my liking, but it gets the job done.

War Room has some nice intentions, and some good production values, but unfortunately it meanders for too long to actually become a good movie. If you're a person of Christian faith this is definitely worth a watch over any alternatives, and there's something worth appreciating even if you're not, and it's definitely not so awful that it's worth making fun of, but I can't see myself watching this ever again. It's a mild step back for the Kendricks, but still not a bad film.




Inside Out:


Can we stop crying wolf about the so-called "decline of Pixar?" Pixar is a company, and like all companies, it has good films and bad films. Other than Cars (the one that nobody seems to like anyways), every Pixar film made dring their golden age, from 2001-2009 (Monsters Inc. to Up) was directed by one of three men: Pete Doctor, Andrew Stanton, and Brad Bird. These three all put out consistently amazing Pixar movies, and they haven't declined at all. Starting in 2010, Pixar tried to push a new generation of directors through the door. It's a similar path to Studio Ghibli. Miyazaki and Takahata were knocking it out of the park every single time they made a movie, but knew that they couldn't work forever, so they dedicated themselves to the next generation. The first project from a new director worked, in part because Miyazaki still had an involvement, but newer directors with less control from the original pair resulted in worse movies. In America, Stanton and John Lasseter got to play mentors during Toy Story 3, the first "next generation" Pixar project, which was fantastic. The ones that followed (Cars 2, Brave, and Monsters University), all films led by rookie directors and without much involvement, received mediocre reception. Brad Bird basically spurned the company because he wanted to do live action movies instead. This left Pete Doctor, director of Monsters Inc and Up, as the lone original leader making original movies (Bird and Stanton have since signed up to direct sequels to their older hits). I don't know why everybody was so skeptical about this, or why people were shouting that Pixar was dead, but Pete Doctor could make a great film at any studio. The surprising thing is that I would think Inside Out is the best Doctor movie yet.

Inside Out might not be original, but it is wildly imaginative. I'm not referring to Herman's Head, a crappy television show that people complain did the "emotions inside of a person's head" first (which it still didn't. The idea was used before that show in the Disneyworld attraction Cranium Command.) The plot itself is derivative of Toy Story and to a lesser extent Finding Nemo, where two characters who don't like each other are abandoned together and must make a journey, through which they will learn to like each other. Personally, I don't mind using a recycled plot as long as you take the ideas in a new direction, which Inside Out definitely does. Unlike anything I can think of, Inside Out is almost a psychology class, taking emotional and mental concepts and creating clever visual representations of them in a way that will allow children to understand it. The world-building showcased is outstanding, and maybe my favorite aspect of the film. Brilliant is the only word I can think of to describe how the writers describe the ideas of dreams, depression, ideas, and abstract thought. Something like a literal Train of Thought is nothing new, but representing abstract thinking with an empty space in which physical things and compressed into fewer dimensions is, and my favorite part was the changes in animation style to represent this. I love how different people have different emotions in the center of their control panels. Children are led by Joy, because they're happy and innocent, but the bus driver who has to move them is led by Anger and their teacher is led by Sadness. It simplifies these concepts for kids, but never dumbs them down. It respects the intelligence of youth, willing to think that they can actually learn from their entertainment instead of filling space in their brains with Minions. This is far smarter than nearly every "adult" movie I've seen in my life.

The characters are all great. Some questioned the ability of the emotions to show a range of emotions. They handle that by giving doubt to all emotions. Joy is never sad, but she is often unsure of how to make things happy. The moral of the story is that sadness is good. Sadness as a character is abused in the early stages, making Joy kind of unlikable. The film is smart enough to show how always trying to be happy can destroy a person inside. All of the emotions are also very funny. The jokes themselves are very good, but they're accentuated by the talented comedic actors saying them. Lewis Black as Anger and Phyllis from The Office as Sadness are the best casting choices that anybody could ever hope for. Anger especially is consistently hilarious. Bill Hader plays Fear, who doesn't have a huge role but does get a great scene where he gives a terrible review of Riley's dream as if it were a movie. Riley herself doesn't get very much to do, but for the purposes of this film that works fine. Then there's imaginary friend Bing Bong, and I have nothing to say about Bing Bong except that he is lovable and complex and yes I cried during that scene. The emotions that I felt watching these emotions were intense. This film makes you feel like a kid and then makes you sad that you're not still one. It's the most affecting movie I've seen in a while.

Technically, Inside Out is marvelous. Pixar's animation is back to innovating, finally stepping out of the huge Dreamworks shadow. Joy is not traditionally animated, instead existing only as a three dimensional outline with a light center providing the color and textures. I can't recall seeing any other animated character model like this. The backgrounds are all gorgeous, and the giant structures inside of Riley's head look amazing. There are scenes where massive buildings are falling, and the impact and grandiosity of it all far exceed any disaster movie I've ever seen. It was impressively crisp and real, and it's by far the best 3D animation to ever come out of the Disney banner. The score is simple but sounds wonderful, and matches the raw emotion of the film perfectly.

Taking the very best ideas of Inception and mixing them with professional psychology, Inside Out is the most clever movie Pixar has ever made. It's also their most emotional, their funniest, and quite possibly their best. A deserving potential winner of Best Original Screenplay awards, this is an instant classic, a gorgeous and genius masterpiece of filmmaking. It's not just for both kids and adults, I think adults will love this much more than kids. Kids can enjoy the jokes and pretty animation, but adults can appreciate the brilliance used in the ideas, and the emotional impact is benefited by nostalgia. It's even more rewarding for those who remember being a kid than for those who still are.




The Good Dinosaur:


If Neil Blomkamp or dark ages Ridley Scott made an animated movie, it would be The Good Dinosaur. This film looks so pretty, and it has so little of merit other than looking pretty. Words probably cannot describe it, but you can look at trailers and screenshots for yourself. This movie is gorgeous. The backgrounds are stellar, and I thought the cartoonish character design would bother me juxtaposed next to that, but I got used to it, and once you settle in this movie is beautiful to look at. It might be the best animation ever put onto a computer screen. But animation can only take you so far, and the poor writing and uninteresting characters can't bring me to call this a "good" movie. Of course, this shouldn’t be surprising to anybody who was following this film’s production history. Originally scheduled to be released in fall of 2013, original director Bob Peterson had originally developed a story about dinosaurs who formed a classist agrarian society, focusing on an outcast and his boy best friend as they try to prove their worth. By all accounts that story was absolutely terrible, causing the film to get delayed twice to fall of 2015, Peterson to be replaced by a combination of 4 directors, and the closing of Pixar’s Canadian office. Even if you didn’t know that information, it quickly becomes very obvious that the story shown on screen is a clustercuss, a seemingly random combination of a few ideas that have nothing to do with each other. The story is very jumpy in the sense that it doesn’t maintain any kind of narrative focus from beginning to end. The first act is lifted directly from The Lion King. For the rest of the movie, the two main characters will see a problem, solve it in ten minutes, run across well-animated landscapes, see another problem, and the cycle repeats itself. I hate to say this about a Pixar movie, because I hold those to higher standards than any other American animation studio working today, but sitting through this film felt like watching a television miniseries. It’s paced like a series of 20 minute television episodes, and that’s not what Pixar should be about.

Aside from that, the story is the normal Pixar plotline. Two characters who don't like each other get lost together and have to work together to find their homes and families. This gets crossed with a boy and his dog story, with the twist of the boy Spot being the dog of the titular dinosaur Arlo. Somebody must have thought that was clever somewhere along the line, but I have no idea who to blame. Most Pixar movies will focus on the relationship between these two, creating iconic characters as the center of a world class movie. This is my biggest problem with The Good Dinosaur: nothing about Spot or Arlo or their relationship stands out. They could have been interesting characters, but neither one of them gets any kind of development beyond a basic trait and a backstory. Arlo is scared of everything and alone. Spot is fearless and alone. And that's it. There was plenty of opportunity to give them characters, but this film limps to the finish line. It clocks in at just over 85 minutes, and most of that run time is made up of side quests. A slow drama with the two leads growing together could have been much more interesting than what was given, which was the two leads meandering in the wild and then running into a dinosaur. The plot structure is repetitive and dull. Nothing happens in the story, and that story takes time away from the character work.

Animated dinosaur movies are a small genre, notable for being animation showcases with inane scripts. This isn't nearly as bad as Disney's DINOSAUR or BBC's Walking With Dinosaurs, but the script here is bad. I'm not necessarily opposed to modern vernacular, which has worked wonders for Pixar is years past, but the dialogue sticks out here. It never stops shouting whiny teenage cliches and slang. The voice actors don't help matters at all. Arlo is voiced by Ray Ochoa, a child actor, and I think it really could have benefited from a professional actor lending some work. If I want to see a pair of teenage siblings bicker and shout “daaang”, I would be watching something made by BlueSky or Dreamworks. Maybe I could have excused this if the film was funny, but it wasn’t. I never laughed, and honestly I can’t even see kids laughing very much. I’ve heard many people say that their children were really bored in the last hour, and I don’t doubt that at all. The comedy isn’t physical, and none of the dialogue was clever or relatable in the way that I laughed at Inside Out for reminding me of the silly things I used to do as a kid.


Of course, this movie isn’t really that bad in the way that I’d rather watch it again than The Nut Job. Another way that it reminds me of Blomkamp or 2000s Scott is that even when it doesn’t work, it’s not because it wasn’t ambitious. The plot summary might be rambling, and there might be nothing memorable about it, but it is certainly professional and a lot of hard working people obvious put a lot of effort into it. If your child wants to watch Norm of the North or Alvin and the Chipmunks, you will be much happier watching this, but I can’t see it being one of those Pixar movies that people keep coming back to a decade later.



28 days...6 hours...42 minutes...12 seconds
Scouts guide to the Zombie Apocalypse deserves a higher rating than that....
__________________
"A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it's the only weapon we have."

Suspect's Reviews




Pain & Gain:



Michael Bay is an underrated director. He has made a few good films. This is one of them. "Pain and Gain" is the antithesis of Bay criticisms, featuring no CGI, a small budget, and an anti-American, anti-conservative message. It's also an intelligent film, a biting commentary on the American Dream. From Michael Bay. Starring Marky Mark. I'm more surprised than anyone at how much I loved this.

"Pain and Gain" is the story of Daniel Lugo, Adrian Dorbal, and Paul Doyle, played respectively by Whalberg, Anthony Mackie, and The Rock. It is the "true story", which actually is rather close to the truth, of how these three men became the stupidest murderers in history. Something you'll quickly realize is that, with the exception of a retired police detective played by Ed Helms, every single character falls somewhere between idiotic and incompetent, from the killers to the victims to the cops chasing them. Everybody with a name wants to seek the American Dream, and Michael Bay wants you to know how awful this dream really is. You can be a "don't-er" and never accomplish anything with your life, or you can die trying, but either way your existence is empty. Anybody who tries to do something for other people is called a failure by the protagonists, but at the end of the day Lugo and company fail much more often than they succeed in trying to benefit just themselves, which as Lugo ends the film with, is considered to be "the true American Dream": shallow, lonely, and left for dead. "I don't just want everything you have", Whalberg says in a particularly poignant speech to a rich man he is jealous of, but "I want you to not have it". Most people think of Bay as as a populist, which his "Transformers" movies definitely are, but "Pain and Gain" is a feel-bad film with a pessimistic worldview.

In that way, the film works on its own as a dramatic piece of art. Lugo and Doyle both have complete characters, with fulfilled arcs and layered performances. Daniel Lugo is one of the dumbest people ever seen on a screen, and he is the relative smart one of the group. He is also extremely frightening when he has to be. On a dime, he can turn from a moronic bodybuilder who drops stupid comments about how being fat and eating salad is unamerican into a stone cold psychopathic killer. He is fierce and incompetent at the same time. Whalberg does a great job at bringing Lugo to life, buffing up physically and becoming this character, playing him as dumbly as possible. Paul Doyle (a fictional combination of multiple associates of Lugo) has an equally compelling character. He is a 300 pound monster and a jail inmate who becomes a born again Christian, only to fall back into his old ways after joining Lugo. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has never been much of an actor, but he gives a genuinely phenomenal performance in this movie. He could have won a comedy Golden Globe for this work. A lot of it is good writing in contrasts, because this giant man listens to Christian rock music and is soft in his personality, but The Rock is a great physical actor, not just with his ripped body but also with his facial expressions, and his line delivery nails the stereotype of a Miami bodybuilder who has never touched a book in his life. The Rock actually becomes a character, and he comes off as a real person, which is something I never thought I would say about him. His comedic timing is excellent, and he handles dramatic beats almost as well.

While it is certainly dark, "Pain and Gain" is a dark comedy before anything else, and this film is absolutely hilarious. I disagree with the idea that the film fails by making these killers sympathetic. The three killers are dumb, awful people, and the audience is supposed to be laughing at how stupid they are. They are intended to be funny, not likable. It is similar to "The Wolf of Wall Street" by focusing on morally bankrupt people and making their adventures funny, but this is funnier and features less indulgence. Nearly every single joke connects. Mark Whalberg found his comedic timing for the first time in a decade by interjecting fitness lingo into his crime preparations. A serious movie would show a character discussing how to attack a victim. Daniel Lugo insults him for his poor quad definition and dresses up as a ninja to attempt kidnapping him. This is a man who looks up to his role models, Scarface and Michael Corleone, and assures his companions that nothing bad can happen because he has seen enough movies. The Rock gets so many fantastic jokes, both making them and being the butt of them. He gets to deliver most of the film's more absurd moments, usually working around his addictions to Jesus and cocaine. He is even dumber than Lugo whether he is maiming bodies or giving sermons. Unable to form a personal relationship with victim Victor Kershaw, he has to settle for making the rich Jewish man accept God into his heart. Anthony Mackie is restricted to sex jokes, and they are some of the weaker parts of the film. It is most reminiscent of older Michael Bay works, playing erectile dysfunction for laughs. Still, Mackie is a decent actor, and he has great chemistry with Johnson and Whalberg to maintain a sort of Three Stooges dynamic, if each of them weighed over 200 pounds and had a negative IQ. That's not to mention various supporting players, like comic actors that I usually cannot stand such as Rebel Wilson and Ken Jeong, both of which had a few funny lines and solid performances, or one line extras that get to play along with the idiocy of the main trio, like a Home Depot employee who receives a chainsaw that stopped working after it got stuck with human hair, calls it fur, and gladly lets Lugo switch it out for a different power tool (This event, unfortunately, is definitely historically accurate). Bay even manages to subvert the misogyny that he is so often blamed for with a brilliant joke in which Daniel demonstrates the importance of neighborhood safety by asking for a volunteer rapist to attack his stripper girlfriend, only for every single man in the neighborhood to try to volunteer, forcing Lugo to declare that it is "not a gang rape" and that he only needs one man. It is a vicious assault on married men with a seemingly perfect life who are desperate for a touch of a younger woman. Like everyone else, the part of the neighboring men, though brief, emphasizes how unintelligent Americans can be at their worst, and how being wealthy is pointless when people are that brainless. The screenwriters have crafted a world just dumb enough for Daniel and friends to think that they are the smartest ones in the room without earning anything, serving as a reinforcement for Daniel's belief that making a plan and taking action can make anybody rich without earning anything, and making me believe that this country has no chance of survival because people like this really exist.

Michael Bay's directing trademarks complement the ridiculous film perfectly. His aggressive camera movement gives energy to the numerous dialogue sequences between action scenes, which make up most of the run time. The slow motion gives the movie time to breathe between laughs and allows for Mark Whalberg to act with his exaggerated body language. The intense, bright colors make for great sets, creating an environment that endorses excess as much as the characters, all of the characters, criminals, victims, and peacekeepers alike. The typical assault on the senses is as obnoxious as ever, but it is supposed to be obnoxious in this case. "Pain and Gain" needs to be as loud and in-your-face as the characters and the plot, which has minor details so bizarre that it must be real, because it seems impossible to make up. Bay's new stylistic trick, which the screenwriters should really be credited for (although Bay did execute it flawlessly), is the nearly constant voiceover to express the inner thoughts of characters. If only Daniel Lugo was doing voiceovers, the movie could have become monotonous, but every major character gets to use the device to describe what they are thinking as they are doing things. These segments are always funny, but they also advance the plot and characters in a way that would not be possible with just dialogue. Daniel might be laughing about almost killing Victor while showing a straight face, but Paul is deeply sad because he thinks that his immoral actions could keep him out of heaven while keeping the act up for his partners, and Victor himself is laughing in his head about how he should not be alive while he is physically unable to form laughter. More than just a cheap storytelling device, the voiceovers add a new dimension to a movie that needed them to work as well as it does.

I do not know why this got such poor reviews. I think Bay's name has a lot to do with it, unfairly so. There are a few points against it that are valid but do not personally bother me. Maybe it was inappropriate to make a comedy about real criminals, turning kidnappers into protagonists. Maybe the film is misogynist more often than it isn't, relegating all women to mindlessly following their illegal husbands. And maybe it is a little bit too violent for its own good. But those negatives don't detract from an amazing experience, it's just minutia that prevents it from landing a perfect score. "Pain and Gain" is a fantastic film that works because of its committed actors, darkly funny script, tight direction, and deep social commentary. Regardless of how much you dislike the names involved, this is a film that absolutely must be seen.