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Retribution

Retribution by Liam Neeson

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retribution: punishment inflicted on someone as vengeance for a wrong or criminal act.

In Retribution, Neeson plays Matt Turner, a financial advisor who works for an investment firm in Berlin.  (The city, pretty as it is, plays no role in the plot.)  Matt is an absentee husband who barely acknowledges his lovely wife Heather (Embeth Davidtz), choosing to focus on work instead.  He’s no better as a father, only interacting with his handsome kids Emily (Lilly Aspell) and Zach (Jack Champion) to yell at them and/or boss them around.  The kids don’t like each other either, insulting and hitting each other as only spoiled rich kids can do.  The Turner family is clearly dysfunctional.  Thankfully, some shared family trauma will help them all reconnect before the day ends.

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The Beanie Bubble

The Beanie Bubble

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By the time you read this review of The Beanie Bubble, the internet will already have produced at least a dozen think pieces discussing 2023 as “The Year Brands Came to the Movies”.  I would assume that they all touch on what is the most logical reason why movies are suddenly suffering from brand-itis: marketing these movies is so much simpler than selling a biography.  What would you be more inclined to watch, a movie about Ty Warner and the people behind the company that produced beanie babies, or a movie about the untold story of beanie babies?  Marketing a movie about a product is so much easier because generations of people are familiar with Beanie Babies.  It stands to reason that they’d be interested in a movie about a product they bought at some point in time.

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Ruby Gillman Teenage Kraken

Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken

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In Roger Ebert’s review for Ratatouille, he emphasizes how animated film isn’t just for children, but for the whole family and even adults going on their own.  I kept thinking about that while watching Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken, a hyperactive, garish, humorless and unoriginal animated movie made ostensibly for children.  Amazingly, this is the second animated film released in the last year or so that uses a girl’s transition into womanhood as a metaphor for gaining supernatural powers.  Pixar’s Turning Red was released over a year before this movie and is the far superior film in every way.

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Nefarious Movie 2023

Nefarious

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I want to sue the people behind Nefarious for fraud. This is not because something in the trailer wasn’t in the movie. No, Nefarious is fraudulent because the advertising campaign behind it implies that it is a horror movie, and it is not. At least not in the literal sense. The movie is actually a Christian pro-life diatribe in the guise of a horror movie. Maybe people who fall into that category believe in their hearts and minds that the topics discussed in this movie are horrific. If that’s true, then I guess there will be plenty of opportunities for them to shout “alleluia” and “amen” while they watch this movie. If the intent of the filmmakers behind Nefarious was to convert the unwashed, it fails completely due to the disgusting shots it takes at the other side. I don’t know what appeal this movie would have to those who consider themselves righteous, since it basically preaches to the already enraptured choir. While Nefarious is a well-made movie that features decent acting, competent direction and realistic sets, the argument it makes is pure lunacy, at least in the viewpoint of this lapsed Catholic. As if that weren’t enough, the movie features a shocking cameo at the end of the movie by a fringe media figure that left my jaw agape with utter disbelief. (As much as I want to, I refuse to spoil it. I have movie critic principles to uphold.) Not Recommended. Unless you’re morbidly curious, then have at it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

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Life is good for Scott Lang (Paul Rudd).  After helping the Avengers undo The Blip and defeat Thanos, everyone loves Ant-Man.  The movie’s funniest bit is when it shows Lang walking carefree around San Francisco to the chorus of “Welcome Back” graciously accepting free coffee and meals because people confuse him with Spider-Man.  (I would have chosen “Believe It or Not”, the theme song from “Greatest American Hero”.)  Aside from his heroic exploits, Scott  is just an all around good guy.  Problem is, he doesn’t know what to do with himself in this post-Endgame world.  As his daughter Cassie helpfully points out, he’s been content to rest on his laurels instead of choosing to engage with the world’s numerous problems.  Fortunately (or unfortunately) for Scott, he lives in the MCU.  Defeating one existential threat only means that an even bigger and badder one is on the way.

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The Wonder

The Wonder

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Set in Ireland in 1862, The Wonder tells the story of a young girl named Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy) who hasn’t eaten in four months.  Everyone around her considers her to be a wonder.  The town leaders (a priest, a doctor, a landlord and a Lord) want to confirm whether she is a living miracle or not, so they commission English nurse Elizabeth Wright (Florence Pugh) to help watch her to see if she’s actually eating.  Elizabeth knows it’s not possible for a human being to live for that long without sustenance.  William Byrne (Tom Burke), reporter for the Daily Telegraph, also believes the girl is a “wee faker”, but is more interested in who is pulling the puppets strings.  When Lib suspects the girl’s mother Rosaleen is behind the ruse, Lib forbids anyone from interacting with the girl.  As expected, Anna begins to slowly die.  But why would Rosaleen want her own child to die?

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Halloween Ends

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In Halloween Kills (the previous entry in this series), Michael Myers escaped certain death when some unwitting firefighters rescued him from Laurie Strode’s burning home.  He then proceeded to lay waste to the entire firefighter squad without breaking a sweat.  While Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Deputy Frank (Will Patton) recovered from their injuries at the hospital, Michael made mincemeat out of a self-styled vigilante mob led by survivors of the original.  Last but not least, Michael shockingly killed Laurie’s daughter Karen (Judy Greer).  Ends picks up the story one year later.  Michael has not been seen since the prior year, and the town has shifted back towards normalcy.  (Sorry Haddonfield, IL, your town will never be “normal”.)

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Where The Crawdads Sing

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If Where The Crawdads Sing was only about a girl living in the North Carolina marsh who, after being abandoned by her entire family, learned how to survive and grew up to become a successful nature illustrator, the movie would have been a compelling one.  Unfortunately, the story doesn’t have anywhere near the confidence that Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) has in herself.  Instead of following through on the themes of independence and self-reliance, the story chooses a safer approach by including a plethora of subplots that are under-cooked and unconvincing.

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Lightyear

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Pixar, the studio that has produced so many animated classics, has managed to do the unimaginable.  Somehow, they’ve taken one of their best known and beloved characters, Buzz Lightyear, and put him into a boring, generic science-fiction adventure.  On top of that, Buzz is no longer the officious-yet-funny blowhard.  Instead, he’s a person with no sense of humor and several troubling psychological tendencies.  In Lightyear, Buzz (voiced by Chris Evans) is a Space Ranger whose dislike of computers is matched only by his avoidance of help from others.  (Why?  Who knows.)  His single-mindedness nearly gets himself and everyone else killed, and from that point on, he’s fixated on undoing his mistake.  Buzz proceeds to spend years testing a new fuel cell that could get everyone back home, to the exclusion of all else.  Every test only lasts minutes for him, but years elapse for everyone else.  Best with failure after failure, he loses his only friend Alisha (Uzo Aduba) to old age.  (Yes, this is a children’s cartoon.)

Fortunately, his new companion, a computerized cat robot named SOX (Peter Sohn), helps him solve a problem with the fuel cell.  But first, Buzz must deal with Zurg and his robot henchmen.  Why is Zurg attacking the colony?  Why is Zurg hell-bent on capturing Buzz?  The answers may surprise you, especially if you’ve seen The Lego Movie: The Second Part.  Everything about Lightyear is surprisingly lazy.  With the exception of SOX, the jokes fall flat.  The science-fiction aspect is a timid riff on Interstellar.  The graphics are shockingly dull for a company that made Wall-E.  The morals of the story, about moving on from failure and accepting the help of others, have none of the emotional resonance of prior Pixar movies.  There may never have been a good reason to make Lightyear, but that’s no excuse for the result being this shallow and listless.  If cribbing from a Warner Brothers animated feature isn’t the equivalent of Pixar hitting rock bottom, I don’t know what is.  Pixar won Best Animated Feature not even two years ago for Soul.  How can this be the same studio?  Not recommended.  (Not even on Disney+)

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