The Girl With All The Gifts

#StokerScore 6/10

There was a time when you could rely on your horror movies to stick to the rules. Vampires were debonair/voluptuous, werewolves were hirsute and usually not of their own free will, ghosts rattled chains, serial killers were never stopped by the first thing that should have killed them, and zombies shuffled, slowly and menacingly in search of brains.  There were no A-list stars, the sets were relatively cheap, the blood was plentiful and there was no message other than not to indulge in sex before marriage as that way you could avoid said horror staple sending you off to hell.....then it all changed.

well, it's not Top Gun, is it?

I'm not sure which movie it was that changed the way each genre modified their own future, was it 28 Days Later for the zombies? Was it Alien for the ET's? I'm sure that movie buffs out there could tell me, but I generally embrace change, especially where horror movies are concerned, it's just that we seem to have hit a writers block and this is especially so with zombies. On one hand we have The Walking Dead, these reanimated corpses are still not referred to as zombies but are classic shufflers, taking out the human population either by force of numbers or appearing, silently, at the most inconsiderate of moments. Then we have the zombies in The Girl With All The Gifts, ravenous sprinters whose need is for human flesh and the spread of their virus. The problem with these two examples is that they're getting a tad boring. TWD is at season 7 now (I packed in watching after Season 5, so repetitive was the whole thing) and TGWATG is really just 28 Days Later but instead of the experimented zombies chained in the laundry yard, the experts have found other ways of assessing the virus, mutation. 

That being said, I loved seeing Glenn Close with the Army buzz cut, Paddy Considine being his usual mister dependable, and Gemma Arterton being Gemma Arterton. Alongside these stalwarts was child actor Sennia Nanua and bless her she really tried. She was saddled with some horrific dialogue but in the early stages of the film you really felt for her character and that was more than could ever be said for Kevin McAllister in Home Alone. 

Characters still do stupid stuff that warrants untimely deaths, so I guess some original horror movie tropes are respected and if you like a (very slight) change to your zombie fayre then this would be worth your time but I think zombies are in need of an upgrade or maybe we could go back to the voodoo roots?

Split

#StokerScore 8/10

I clicked Google images to find a movie poster to go with this review, as I always do, and was slightly thrown that the first images to come up were for the Croatian town or a yoga exercise because there was a time, relatively not that long ago either, when M. Night Shyamalan's name was a guarantee of a film's potential. 

Hitchcock was notoriously difficult to spot

He was "the man who does the twist ending", who does the Hitchcock thing of appearing in his own movies, all of this following a string of films that had twists towards the end of the film and small cameos played by the director. The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, I enjoyed all of them and I really enjoyed the range of actors that he encouraged into the movies too. Joaquin Phoenix was great alongside Mel Gibson in Signs, much better than when chewing scenery for Ridley Scott in Gladiator at any rate, Bruce Willis, Samuel L., William Hurt, and he was pretty good at getting performances out of kids, too. Haley Joel Osment, Spenser Treat Clark, Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin, to name just some (notice I don't mention Jaden Smith here)

Shyamalan could have got a good performance out of Jake 

Then the bubble burst, or the schtick got old, or the Midas touch left him because he made a series of dreadful movies topped off by the disaster that was the abysmal, diabolical, awfulness After Earth. Bang in the middle of his bad run he happened to produce a classic little horror in Devil, so maybe he's just better when not playing with big budgets? I guess time will tell because with Split he's back to a much more dialogue-driven, small budget affair. Gone too is the twist ending, well, to a certain extent but this is a spoiler free zone so all I'll say is that if you're over 30 you might just appreciate the end of this movie.

What's good? Well, the writing is getting better again and the performances, especially from James McAvoy and his psychiatrist played by Betty Buckley and reminiscent of Jenny O'Hara in Devil,  are excellent. The smaller scale in terms of the sets encourages you to focus on the actors, and there is a pervasive sense of pessimism that I always found in his earlier films running through this one too.

I just saw the....Last Airbender

I left the cinema having thoroughly enjoyed this, I thought it was sensitive towards mental illnesses, as much as it could be, especially showing the caring side of the psychiatrist and the greater acceptance of mental disorders. All in all it was a welcome return to form and I can't wait to see what M. Night has for us next...

John Wick: Chapter Two

#StokerScore 6/10

Do you ever find yourself eating in a restaurant that you occasionally like to go to because the food is usually good and it's one of the best places to get a specific dish that you like? Not the only place that you can buy it, just a preference? Yeah, me too. That was what I was doing just before watching the highly anticipated second outing for Keanu's latest franchisee. 

It was a Thai-themed place that does pretty good Som Tam. For those of you unfamiliar with Thai food, this is a vegetarian, shredded papaya salad that is mixed with tomatoes, green beans, peanuts, chillies and fish sauce. It's pretty fiery and I think it goes really well with grilled meats or other finger food. If I was going to review the meal and the restaurant, I'd probably tell you that they didn't meet my expectations. The salad wasn't as spicy as usual, there was an obvious lack of attention to detail with the shredding of the papaya - some of which had come off the mandolin in a whole, slightly serrated slice rather than the individual julienne. The grilled chicken also seemed half-hearted with some bits being a single bone with no actual meat on it. Top that off with the waiter's apology that they'd run out of beer and I left feeling decidedly underwhelmed. The Som Tam was still Som Tam, just not the kind of Som Tam that leaves me with a big smile on my face (trust me, it does when it's good).

Remarkably, this was pretty much how I left the movie too. Chapter Two ticks all of the boxes that made Chapter One such a huge success; guns, mixed martial arts, sartorial villain and this time even reminded me of a couple of Bond set pieces which if you're familiar with classic Bond movies will hopefully stand out to you as much as they did to me. But it lacked the heart, the soul that made the first one so fun and not as predictable.

Maybe I'm too cynical. Maybe I should try to be less subjective and not allow my frame of mind or mood to cloud my judgement. Maybe if the Som Tam had been better I would have enjoyed the movie more, but I doubt it.

Keanu is still Keanu, Peter Stormare makes a great bad guy and is one of two characters to resume an on screen relationship with Reeves (Stormare played Lucifer in Constantine and Morpheus makes a return, or at least Laurence Fishburne does) and the transfer to Rome, highlighting that the crime syndicates are global, is a nice touch. Yet still I felt underwhelmed. It was like watching a chef make something he's made a thousand times and, rather than be interested in investing the dish with his enthusiasm, he just looks at the finished article and says "yeah, thet'll do".

As I said, the boxes are ticked and at times there is enough excitement to put you closer to the edge of your seat, you'll just never quite reach that far because something inside tells you it isn't really worth it.

iBoy

#StokerScore 3/10

Having seen the trailer for this new Netflix Original a couple of weeks ago, I was intrigued. It reminded me of The Matrix with a couple of visuals, the casting of Rory Kinnear as 'the bad guy', following up his turn as the monster in Penny Dreadful, and Maisie Williams, whose character in Game of Thrones suggests a real talent is about to explode were well placed, the London setting was even reminiscent of Joe Cornish's 2011 sci-fi surprise Attack The Block, so all looked good. 

I haven't read the Kevin Brook's novel, on which the movie is based, so was coming to it with only the trailer's information. The unwinnable 'book vs novel' argument is not something I ever want to discuss as it is, IMO, unfair to both genres in terms of putting the story on the screen, but it does allow for some interesting comparisons in visualising the authors intentions. 

All was going along swimmingly, if slightly predictably, in this story of an underdog righting wrongs for the love of a fair maiden. It's every superhero story you've ever seen, but with a tweak rather than a twist, the tweak being the superpowers and how they are, unexplainedly, happening. That being said, it's easy to guess between the lines and is enjoyable right up to the introduction of Kinnear's Ellman. At this point, either the editor of the movie left a hugely important scene on the cutting room floor or the audience is expected to believe that a line has been drawn between two invisible dots. I was gobsmacked. What came after, the way the movie ended was right there alongside all superhero movies, but that hole in the story, that was really unexpected and quite spoiled the movie for me.

After forty minutes or so, I was looking at a solid 8 on the stokerscore-o-meter but the missing link, so to speak, has left me still annoyed after sleeping on my review thoughts.