Month: May 2017

Starring: Dwayne Johnson (Central Intelligence), Zac Efron (Bad Neighbours), Priyanka Chopra (Quantico), Alexandra Daddario (San Andreas), Kelly Rohrbach (The PET Squad Files), Ilfenesh Hadera (Chi-Raq), Jon Bass (Loving)

Director: Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses)

Writers: Damian Shannon & Mark Swift (Freddy vs. Jason)

Runtime: 1 hour 56 minutes

Release Date: 25 May (US), 29 May (UK)

Does anyone actually like Baywatch for any reason other than irony or TNA? It was a cheesy show that managed to stay on the air because it had scantily clad women running in slow motion in a pre-Internet age, and beyond that it didn’t have much going for it. But in spite of or perhaps even because of that, the series has managed to remain in the pop culture zeitgeist, and so a film adaptation was inevitable. Playing the entire thing as a joke was probably the best idea, nobody wants to see this material played straight, but there is such a thing is bad satire. Unfortunately, Baywatch is very much in the bad satire camp.

The plot of an average episode of Baywatch was always something ridiculous and well out of the bounds of a lifeguard to handle, and the movie understands that. There are some prime targets to rip apart and satirize in a 21 Jump Street-style way, which is clearly what this movie is aiming for. However, the film version of Baywatch has nowhere near the amount of wit and ingenuity that film had. Whereas the Jump Street films took the clichés of the source material and twisted them to its own means, this film plays the generic plot completely straight and just has characters point out how nonsensical it is. The story is a textbook cop movie with obvious twists and very little unique assets, and its method of “satire” only highlights how trite the material is instead of making any actual jokes out of it.

When it’s not doing that, the gags are cringe-worthy and sophomoric on the level of a horny teenager and they stop the movie completely dead. For example, there is a five-minute sequence where a character gets their genitals trapped in a deckchair. It’s not funny, it goes on far too long, and nothing important to the plot even happens. The whole movie lacks any kind of logical flow, with the first act consisting of our “heroes” just trading jibes whilst occasionally cutting to the villain for no real reason other than establishing that there is a villain. By the time the film is over, it clearly thinks it has set up the next big comedy franchise, but no statement could be more false.

Dwayne Johnson is a man who seems to have an abundance of charisma and can overcome even the weakest material, but for the first time his charm has failed him. Johnson is clearly trying, but he and the rest of the cast fall victim to the exact same issue: none of the characters have any consistency in regards to function and intelligence. Johnson’s Mitch is supposed to be the charming leader who always knows best and saves the day, but whenever the plot comes into play he turns into a buffoon. Zac Efron’s Brody is always the one pointing out how ridiculous it is for lifeguards to be investigating a drug ring, but then he becomes reckless and idiotic whenever it wants to make Johnson look good. Even Alexandra Daddario as Summer, who for the most part is played as the logical straight woman, will go along with bad plans and play the fool for the sake of a gag.

Kelly Rohrbach’s role is pretty much just being the Pamela Anderson stand-in for Jon Bass’ Ronnie to ogle at, whilst Ilfenesh Hadera doesn’t even get a distinguishable personality. Bass’ role in the story is weak and poorly justified, and his relationship with Rohrbach has potential but they never do enough with it; they just sort of hang around awkwardly with each other until the third act just kind of resolves it out of nowhere. Priyanka Chopra as the villain Victoria Leeds is given nothing interesting to do and barely even any funny lines, with her only real purpose being to drag the paper-thin plot behind her. The only person who is consistently funny is Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as a frustrated cop that Johnson is always messing with, basically serving as an amalgam of Ice Cube and Nick Offerman’s roles in the Jump Street films, but they don’t do nearly enough with him. The film even wastes its cameos from original Baywatch stars, giving them a brief scene each and only one obvious gag when the gold material just sits there begging to be handled.

Baywatch could have been a genuinely funny send-up of a cheesy TV show and it is given every opportunity to do so if it simply tried, but it bails at every hurdle. It is ultimately a simple case of a comedy not being funny, mainly because it goes for the easy joke every time and can’t even do that right. The occasional funny line slips through (usually an ad-lib rather than any of the set piece gags) the performances are at least charismatic when they’re not inconsistent, and I wouldn’t say of the humour is awful or offensive, but none of that can save what should be a laugh-a-minute summer riot. I’d say skip the beach for now and wait for the next seasonal comedy to come around. You’ll probably be stepping into much safer waters than this.

FINAL VERDICT: 3.5/10

Starring: Johnny Depp (Black Mass), Javier Bardem (Skyfall), Geoffrey Rush (The King’s Speech), Brenton Thwaites (Gods of Egypt), Kaya Scodelario (The Maze Runner)

Directors: Joachim Ronning & Espen Sandberg (Kon-Tiki)

Writer: Jeff Nathanson (Catch Me If You Can)

Runtime: 2 hours 9 minutes

Release Date: 25 May (UK), 26 May (US)

Yes, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is still a thing. To think that The Curse of the Black Pearl was that film no one expected to be good but turned out great, and now all the sequels are films everyone hopes to be good but never quite are. Dead Man’s Chest was decent but only barely, At World’s End is a bloated and incomprehensible mess, and On Stranger Tides pretty much no one even remembers. But they’ve all been massively successful regardless, and so a fifth film has finally sailed its way into theatres. Can it redeem the franchise back to its brief moment of glory, or is it going to sink to the depths of our subconscious like most of these movies have?

Salazar’s Revenge (as it is called in Europe for some reason, instead of the much less generic Dead Men Tell No Tales) thankfully cuts down on a lot of the needlessly complex storylines going on in the other Pirates sequels, bringing it back to a more streamlined premise of “let’s all go find the MacGuffin”. That doesn’t mean the film has completely stripped the fat, as the film is still a tad too long with pointless characters and plot cul-de-sacs that contribute nothing, but it’s at least simple enough to follow from beginning to end. The problem is what’s left is pretty much a grab bag of every trope of this franchise with very little new material added on. The story down to the structural level is a rehash of The Curse of the Black Pearl, but not in that knowing homage way like The Force Awakens did. It just feels like a vain attempt to recapture the magic of the first film by essentially repeating it with a new coat of paint. But even though for the most part these attempts at nostalgia fall flat, there is the occasional character moment that works, and the film concludes in a way that feels like an appropriate end to the franchise. It’s perhaps not the best executed, but it at least has a sense of conclusiveness to it…at least until the post-credits scene hinting at a potential sixth film that will once again go back to the rotting well of ideas instead of generating new ones. Sigh.

Remember when Jack Sparrow was a charming and likable character, one so original and well-performed that Johnny Depp actually got an Oscar nomination for it? Fourteen years later, the character has grown tired and, other than his amusing entrance into the film, so clearly has Depp considering how much he is going through the motions here. After failing to work as a lead in On Stranger Tides (because Sparrow was never meant to be a lead; he’s a wildcard character after all), the fifth film wisely lets the other characters progress the plot whilst Depp fools around in the background. However, instead of being far too prominent, now Sparrow lacks any real purpose other than being the centre of the villain’s motivation; without that, you could write him out of the film with little difficulty. There’s an attempt to flesh out Sparrow’s history with a flashback, but it doesn’t establish anything more important than how he got his name and outfit (yes, his costume requires a back story!) Javier Bardem is fine enough as Salazar, but he’s barely any different from any of the other antagonists of the franchise; he’s yet another undead villain with a vendetta against Sparrow out to find the MacGuffin and break his curse. His motivation for hunting down Sparrow is only a hair above nebulous, and Depp and him barely share any screen time until the third act.

In terms of fresh faces, Brenton Thwaites somehow manages to be even more of an uninteresting leading man than Sam Claflin in On Stranger Tides, having an understandable but underdeveloped motivation and a frustrating lack of personality. Despite supposedly being the anchor of the story, he’s such a non-presence that he constantly ends up taking a back seat to the far more interesting Kaya Scodelario. Sure, her relationship with Thwaites is forced and the whole “a woman scientist?” routine is a gag that runs out of steam fast, but Scodelario feels like she is genuinely putting in a performance and she’s far more convincing doing the “woman in a man’s world” thing than Keira Knightley ever did; I’d honestly rather see her continuing adventures than Sparrow’s at this point. The only other cast member who still feels like they’re trying is Geoffrey Rush as Barbossa and he is having a ball as usual. He comes into the story a little too late and an interesting relationship he sparks up with Scodelario is way too underdeveloped to fully impact, but by the end you’ll be glad he was there to remind you of the good old days.

Even in their most convoluted moments, the Pirates series has delivered a lot of memorable action sequences and the fifth instalment is no exception. There are a lot of the usual exchanges of swords and cannonballs, but it feels like all the inventiveness of the movie went into creating some impressive set pieces. The first big action sequence plays like a pirate version of the climax of Fast Five, and as ridiculous as that sounds it’s a well-executed mix of action and comedy that get the film going after a dull prologue. From there, it only gets crazier. There’s a ship that basically eats other ships, a ship’s figurehead that comes to life, the sea splitting Ten Commandments-style, and then there’s ghost sharks; you can’t accuse a movie of being completely uninventive when it has ghost sharks in it. As played-out as the concept of Salazar and his undead crew is, they are at least backed up by some pretty cool designs; the way pieces of them float in the air around them and how Salazar’s hair moves like he’s underwater are nice visual touches. A pity then that the CGI is never particularly convincing; even when compared to the skeletons from the first movie, they look fake. Hans Zimmer unfortunately doesn’t return to score the film, but Geoff Zanelli does a decent enough job picking up his recognisable tunes and giving them a new spin.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge ultimately sits in the middle of the pack in this franchise, learning from some of the mistakes of its forbearers but certainly not enough of them. What little magic it does manage to recapture of the original film is outweighed by what it inferiorly copies and otherwise fails to innovate the tired formula in any important way. It does nothing incredibly poorly by any means and it’s got enough solid moments to be entertaining whilst you watch it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve forgotten most of what happened in it by this time next week. I sincerely hope they decide to discontinue the series from here and leave whilst they still have a semblance of dignity, because what they’re hinting at for the next instalment honestly feels more like a threat than a promise.

FINAL VERDICT: 5/10

Starring: Katherine Waterston (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them), Michael Fassbender (X-Men: Apocalypse), Danny McBride (Pineapple Express), Billy Crudup (Watchmen), Demain Bichir (The Heat), Carmen Ejogo (Selma)

Director: Ridley Scott (The Martian)

Writers: John Logan (Skyfall) and Dante Harper

Runtime: 2 hours 2 minutes

Release Date: 12 May (UK), 19 May (US)

The Alien franchise hasn’t really had anywhere to go in the last twenty-five years. Alien 3 may have initially ended the story on a dampened note, but it was at least definitive. Everything since then has either just repeated what came before or taken it in radically stupid directions. Resurrection was a mutated sore dragging down an otherwise solid trilogy, Prometheus seemed embarrassed to even be associated with Alien when it wasn’t ruining it, and don’t even get me started on the Alien vs. Predator movies. Alien: Covenant seemed like the last shining hope for this series to get back on track; a chance to fix or forget the mistakes of the past and give the fans what they’ve been asking for. Unfortunately, Covenant is ultimately not that movie.

Covenant functions as both a sequel to Prometheus and a prequel to the original film, though it doesn’t resolve everything from the former or lead directly into the latter. The basic set-up is fairly standard for the series thus far: a distress signal brings a crew down to an unknown planet, leading to death and destruction at the hands of an extraterrestrial monster. The film, however, does eschew a lot of familiar concepts to keep the story fresh. The locales are far more open and natural than the usual confines of spacecraft and industrial facilities, a wider variety of alien species are exhibited, and the whole “evil corporation” angle is finally abandoned. The first half of the film isn’t anything special but it does resemble an Alien film without feeling too derivative. However, once the story brings in all the connective tissue between Prometheus and Alien, that’s where it begins to fall apart. The themes about creation and God get dragged out again in lieu of isolation and dread, the third act liberally lifts elements from across the franchise, several obvious twists fall flat, and the film finally answers the question of the Xenomorphs’ origin in a way that is not only lame but completely disregards huge pieces of series lore. I’m not talking about obscure pieces of expanded fiction that were probably never canon. These are concepts that contradict what has been established in even the original film; huge fans of this series are going to notice, and they will not be happy. I can’t say much without spoiling, but this is mythology-f*cking on the level of midichlorians.

The characters of Covenant are a step-up from the cast of Prometheus, but only because they aren’t as frustratingly idiotic. They are instead a merely bland but inoffensive crew that aren’t even as memorable as the characters in the latter half of the original Alien movies. Katherine Waterston puts in a decent performance as lead Daniels, but she’s ultimately yet another Ripley copy with all the gruff edges shaved off. Billy Crudup shows some initial promise the conflicted captain Oram, but by the film’s second half he ceases to have a reason to exist. Danny McBride is the only other interesting crewmember, downplaying his comedic chops to deliver a blithe but suitably dramatic performance; I’m interested to see what he could do in other serious fare. The rest of the crew is a series of redshirts with varying levels of development, who are neither vexing like in Prometheus or memorable enough like those in Alien or Aliens to get any major reaction when they bite the dust. And then there’s Michael Fassbender as the android Walter. Going into his character in depth is major spoiler territory, so I’ll keep it brief: like in Prometheus his acting is good but his character is lacking, and even if you enjoyed his previous performance I don’t think the direction they take it here is a particularly satisfying one.

Ridley Scott isn’t quite the director he was nearly forty years ago when he made the first Alien, but he certainly hasn’t lost his eye. Like Prometheus, a lot of what redeems Covenant is all in the technical achievements. The film looks gorgeously grim, bringing back some of the grit and murkiness of the original film. The production design is grand and earthy with its ships and temples absorbed under the foreboding vines and rocks of the natural planet; it feels almost like a Miyazaki film at points. The classic Xenomorph design triumphantly returns along with some original variants that, whilst not as creative as some concepts explored in expanded fiction, do feel like a natural part of the species’ ancestry. There is a disappointing lack of practical creature work in favour of CG, which takes away a lot of the menace during the intimate horror sequences, but the gore effects all look genuine and they are fantastic; this might be the most blood-happy Alien film to date. Finally, Jed Kurzel’s score for the film is suitably low-key and haunting, along with a lot of cues from Jerry Goldsmith and Marc Streitenfeld’s compositions from Alien and Prometheus respectively woven in at appropriate moments.

Alien: Covenant is a passable sci-fi horror on its own merits, but explaining why it doesn’t work as an Alien movie without completely spoiling it is tricky. Remaining as vague as I can, I think the reason the film ultimately irks me so is because I get the impression that Ridley Scott really resents everything that happened to the series after Alien. He already began steering the ship in a different direction with Prometheus and, as much as many fans disliked that direction, at least he did so without messing with the main series. In response, Scott has effectively given the fans what they wanted whilst on the surface taunting them with everything they didn’t like. Covenant isn’t just Ridley Scott taking his toys and going home. Covenant is Ridley Scott taking not only his toys but also the toys of James Cameron and David Fincher, going home, smashing those toys to pieces, knocking himself over the head until he falls unconscious, waking up in a daze, rebuilding the toys with the missing pieces replaced with stuff nobody asked for until they look enough like they did yesterday, then taking them back to the park and saying, “Here, play with these instead.” This film really sums up why the Alien franchise should have been left alone ever since Ellen Ripley took that final leap into the furnace, but it seems like Scott has plans to power on regardless. Next time, I don’t expect him to listen to his fans properly. I say let the man do what he wants, but that doesn’t mean we have to enable him by seeing these movies anymore.

FINAL VERDICT: 4.5/10