A suboptimal week, with hardly any movie really standing out. But the people demand a winner, so they shall have one!
AKA The Pre-dater
- The Predator (2018): For a franchise as iconic as this, Predator has been plagued by very average sequels. Although, to me, ‘the’ predator movie will aways be Predator 2, which I watched many times as a child from a VHS tape, dubbed in Romanian, the only ones with some critical acclaim are the original and the 2010-try, Predators. Funny enough, I didn’t enjoy Predators much, whereas The Predator actually proved quite a bit of fun. The plot, screenplay and some characters are quite atrocious, but the banter is great and borderline offensive. Which, I guess, is why it’s great. Going for a larger dose of comic relief worked for me. So if you can ignore some of the silliness – or just get on board with it, chances are you might also enjoy this. 6/10
When you need to go beyond watching dogs react to their owners ‘vanishing’
- Alpha (2018): One of the bigger movies of this early autumn, Alpha is a slightly unusual mainstream affair, in that it’s silent a lot of the time and when it isn’t silent, the characters speak a fictional language. Unfortunately, it’s tired, predictable and slow, with fewer emotional hijackings than suspected – and this is a bad thing because I failed to really get into it and didn’t care much for the hut-dwelling characters fueled mostly by their survival instincts and an overly structured sense of familial belonging. Not my cup of tea. 5/10
…people said Brexit and Trump were impossible.
- The First Purge (2018): Although I’ve seen all the four movies now, I can’t say I’ve ever been a fan. That being said, the Purge is not the worst franchise around. It’s one of the few that finds ways to stay pertinent. If you know what this thing is all about (a night a year when all laws are suspended and people can kill/steal/etc. without the legal repercussions), you don’t need a schematic to know where this one’s going. Heck, just reading this phrase should be enough. While there are plenty stereotypes going about, the essence of the movie is about the power political figureheads have in amplifying social rifts and creating self-fulfilling prophecies of doom to support their ‘platforms’. I want to believe people have a propensity for good, even at the worst of times, and that the strain we are being put under to undermine and despise one another is gnawing at the fabric of our existence. Well, I don’t really want to believe the latter part, but that’s what it feels like a lot of the time – a feeling that The First Purge does an excellent job of capturing. And to feed the meta-irony, I was looking at the suspicious recent reviews the movie has on IMDb, with people lambasting it with harsh one liners a la ‘worst film I’ve ever seen’. A lot of those reviews come from users who had never commented on anything else before, sometimes newly registered, other times (most bizarrely) with five-ten year old accounts, who have finally deemed to write their first IMDb contribution, i.e. said one-liner for this flick. Did the the jibe about the Russians really hurt that much? 7/10
At least it left me craving some pizza
- Little Italy (2018): I’m all for unambitious romcoms that parade ethnic stereotypes and sell fortune-cookie level wisdoms, but Little Italy really does a job here! Thankfully, the old, tired cheese and the stale gags are made tolerable by a functional cast, with quite a few character actors and a decent leading couple – Emma Roberts and Hayden Christensen. Let me say it: he’s definitely gone to the dark side with this one (haha, sorry). Long gone are the days of Shattered Glass, Life as a House or even Factory Girl for the Star Wars star. Now any role in third rate movies goes. There were maybe a couple of lines that made me chuckle, and then I chuckled harder at some of the horrendous scenes laid out in the movie. Yet, somehow, it didn’t make me want to end my life or pick up a book. 4/10
tributarystu 