Meewella | Critic

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Tag: Shay Hatten

QuickView: Rebel Moon: Part 1 – A Child of Fire (2023)

“I am a child of war.”

Kora

The parallels between Rebel Moon and Star Wars — both set in a galaxy ruled by an authoritarian empire challenged by a small band of rebels — are overstated and certainly not the primary issue with Zack Snyder’s space opera, which draws liberal inspiration from the past 50 years of sci-fi movies. This “Part 1” (due to be concluded next year) sets up the pleasantly small-scale stakes of a farming community facing a ticking clock to destruction, but it devolves into a collect-a-thon when Kora leaves to recruit warriors to aid their fight. It turns the film’s second act into a series of extended introductions to cookie-cutter characters, usually involving violence. An amalgamation of these scenes may have made for a bombastic trailer but laid out in full it is barely watchable. Rebel Moon’s most interesting character is the android Jimmy, a contemplative former soldier voiced by Anthony Hopkins, but once established he vanishes (the fact he may be relevant in Part 2 does little to aid this film). A villainous Ed Skrein is at least enjoying himself as a cruel and capricious officer. Disappointingly, much of the world building occurs through clunky expository monologues about Kora’s past rather than emerging organically from the story. The purpose of planet-hopping space opera should be to explore the variety offered by a vast galaxy, but Snyder’s “vision” is a series of grimy monochromatic locations that rarely feel like distinct worlds. The action is rote, save for Nemesis’s twin-bladed fight against a chimeric arachnid, and Snyder’s continuing predilection for slow-motion adds little beyond extending the running time. If Netflix is paying for “content”, there is plenty here but with little depth to any of it. Rebel Moon is not even thematically consistent, with Nemesis warning against revenge immediately followed by Kora enticing her next recruit with a promise of revenge. With the production values on display this is not Battlefield Earth bad, but it does become nearly as ponderous. Snyder recently stated that he was glad he didn’t get his wish to direct a Star Wars movie because it granted him greater creative control in Rebel Moon instead; perhaps we should all be equally glad, if not for the same reason.

4/10

QuickView: John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

“How you do anything is how you do everything.”

Marquis

With Chapter 3, I cautioned that the John Wick franchise was on the verge of diminishing returns through familiar repetition; in Chapter 4 it collapses under the weight of its High Table mythology in an overwrought and charmless instalment that runs to nearly three hours. Visual style remains front and centre with fighting figures silhouetted against beautifully lit Japanese decor in Osaka before moving to a Berlin rave, slick with cascading water and neon. The action choreography contains plenty of impressive moments and attention to detail, like a body pivoting on an arrow-pinned joint, but they are strung together in a manner more exhausting than entertaining, with little sense of fighting through interconnected spaces. With better editing, much of the first hour could be excised. Atrocious dialogue belabours the flimsy plot (“It looks like we have a conundrum. A quandary, if you will. A real life dilemma.”), though some new faces are welcome — Bill Skarsgård’s sneering French villain is easy to loathe, whilst Donnie Yen offers the charisma that Wick seems to have lost, playing a blind assassin with largely nonsensical combat abilities. The last hour of the film soars: a kinetic chase across Paris to Sacré-Cœur displays some of the best driving stunt choreography in recent memory, and a lengthy fight up and down the stairs to the church shows Wick earning every step. This strong closing may explain the predominantly positive response to a lumbering action film at nearly twice the length of this year’s similarly stylised Sisu. For all the merit of its individual moments, I cannot imagine wanting to sit through Chapter 4 again.

5/10

QuickView: Army of the Dead (2021)

“You all keep talking about the city like it’s their prison. It’s not. It’s their kingdom.”

Lilly (The Coyote)

In the saturated zombie genre, the proposition of a heist movie set in an infested Las Vegas sounds like a refreshingly fun time. Unfortunately Army of the Dead‘s neon-filled advertising is misleading; the set-up is enjoyable but by the time the crew is ready to enter the city, the atmosphere has already turned dour, heist elements swiftly falling by the wayside amidst familiar zombie action. Whilst it often feels derivative, the film owes more to Aliens than to other zombie films. I routinely forget that Zack Snyder’s debut feature (and one of his best) was the strong 2004 remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Zombies as a representation of mindless consumerism has been a genre staple for 40 years, and scaling up from a shopping mall to the Las Vegas Strip is a logical conclusion. This being a Snyder flick, the allegory is either very on the nose (money raining down during a casino firefight) or rather confused (it is the humans who are motivated predominantly by greed, whilst the “intelligent” zombies have other motivations). It all makes for a competent action film with plenty of gore and a few shocks, but there is little that we haven’t seen done better before.

6/10

QuickView: John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019)

John Wick Chapter 3 poster

“Nothing’s ever just a conversation with you, John.”

Sofia

John Wick: Chapter 3 picks up right where Chapter 2 ended, with John excommunicated from the cult-like order of assassins and a $14 million bounty placed on his head. Like its predecessor, the approach is very much more of the same brutal action, though it fixes a few flaws with fights lit more brightly and easier to follow. Parabellum (literally “prepare for war”) briefly moves the action to the middle east — with heavy overtones of the Assassin’s Creed franchise — but this diversion serves to confuse rather than expand the High Table mythos, becoming ultimately redundant as Wick returns to New York. A welcome change is the number of prominent female roles, Halle Berry proving her action chops in a fight I dubbed “revenge of the dogs”. John Wick‘s strength is a po-faced delivery whilst not taking itself seriously (“What do you need?” / “Guns, lots of guns”, says Keanu Reeves, repeating his line from The Matrix two decades earlier). This is a film in which he can ride a horse through the streets of New York whilst battling bikers. Despite this, a sense of familiar repetition is creeping into the series suggesting that we are on the verge of diminishing returns.

7/10

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

(CC) BY-NC 2003-2023 Priyan Meewella

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