Fantastic Four (2015)

#StokerScore 3/10

I can only imagine that someone at 20th CENTURY FOX, you know who I mean, it says it right there on the poster, the studio who brought us X-Men: Days of Future Past, I can only imagine that their executive said in a meeting "...but just imagine the marketing opportunities if we can get this right!! We could have the rock guy built back in pieces,  and maybe the Human Torch could actually be a torch, and the stretch guy would finally replace Stretch Armstrong and, and, well we're still struggling for how we can make a toy out of the Invisible Girl, but hey, three out of four ain't bad, is it?" I genuinely believe this cash-in was more about the marketing opportunities than it ever was about making a movie. 

For example, Fox are the same film studio who were responsible for this...

and this...

and, lest we forget, this...

Yes I know this is the studio who made Castaway and even True Lies, but my point is that where the current craving for superhero movies meant that even Sony realised they were onto a good thing when Disney agreed to partner them on the next Spider-man movie, so bad was the response to the direction in which they were trying to take that character, for Fox to march blindly forward, desperately hoping to unite the FF's to the X's at some unknown point in the future is just sad to see.

In fact if you look at just how much Fox have been messing about with the X-Men, trying to get that right, and that they thought that people might believe this new Fantastic Four movie more if they reminded people about it on the poster, it reeks of desperation. I mean forget the fact that you've got Josh Trank as director, who created a superhero movie out of a shoestring when he made Chronicle, or the kid from Whiplash starring in the damn thing. To quote Lock Stock's Winston the horticulturalist. "Alarm bells are ringing, Willie"

I wanted to like this movie, I really did. Having only recently seen Ant Man, another example of the incredible things the people at Marvel/Disney can do, I really hoped that this movie was going to be more than the horror stories that were coming from behind the scenes. 

I'm glad I saw this on the big screen rather than wait for the dvd and there are things to like in this movie, there just aren't enough of them to outweigh the things that there are to dislike. And the biggest problem of all? It just wasn't Fantastic.

Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation

#StokerScore 8.5/10

As a kid growing up I used to watch a lot of tv in the summer holidays. English Summers are not just rainy, the amount of water can be of Biblical proportions. So if you woke up to a rainy day and there being no internet or Minecraft available to play in the 70's, you watched TV.

Back then there were also only three channels. You had a choice between BBC1, BBC2 and ITV and the programming was limited to a few, quick, morning kids' shows as there was just so much to pack in to the schedules.

So it was that afternoons would see re-runs of certain tv shows from the 60's, including Mission: Impossible with the debonair Peter Graves in the lead role. 1996 comes along and we're introduced to Tom Cruise as big-screen IMF agent Ethan Hunt and, nearly 20 years later, the franchise is still going strong.

I say that even though I wasn't a real fan of numbers two and three in the series of movies, but 2011's Ghost Protocol really brought it back with some style and that over-the-top action has returned with a vengeance with stunts and a plot of equal complexity.

This movie was actually a solid 9 for me all the way to the end, the extra half mark that I've deducted is because of my personal opinion about the movie's ending. I'm determined to keep these reviews spoiler free, just in case people haven't seen it, but feel free to message me on twitter or facebook to talk about the ending some more.

Cruise is looking older, hell he's no Dorian Gray, yet he still manages to make the action look as realistic as it can given the fact that the missions are technically impossible. That he does a lot of his own stunts, such as the one in the picture above, helps me to accept alot of what his character does too.

I sometimes get a nagging feeling that I've seen some of the set pieces before, there is one scene that reminded me of 'Goldeneye', but with the resurgence of spy movies I guess it's only to be expected.

I thought the bad guy in the movie was particularly good, there are enough red herrings to keep you guessing all the way to the end and it is a rip roaring ride all the way. That being said, when you come off a motorbike, at speed, without a helmet, you do tend to usually wind up at the very least in hospital, if not the morgue.