Tag: USA

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil

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★★★
“An industrial sized box of eye-candy.”

Dear god, the scenery in this is almost unutterably lovely to look at. It’s the kind of film which left me wishing I’d seen it at the cinema, even if I fear my head would have exploded at the beauty of it all. Right from the opening sequence, featuring an insane swooping shot which seems to last forever, it is just gorgeous. The final battle is so lush, a war occurring in a castle the approximate size of Bavaria, against a back-drop of exploding red-clouds made from fae genocide dust, it should be bottled and sold in the skin-care aisle.

The other big positive comes from leading ladies Jolie and Pfeiffer. As we mentioned in our original review, Angelina was born to play Maleficent, and that hasn’t changed. Here, Michelle gives her an excellent foil to go up against. I couldn’t help feeling Pfeiffer’s performance was influenced by Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons – a film in which she also appeared, apparently taking notes. Their scenes opposite each other, such as the Most Uncomfortable Dinner Party Ever, are a delight to watch.

The problem? Uh, basically everything else, beginning with Fanning and Dickinson as the world’s blandest couple, who manage to suck the life from every scene they inhabit. The former is Aurora, now monarch of the magical kingdom, the Moors. She falls for Prince Philip (Dickinson), heir to the throne of Ulstead, and everyone is delighted that their impending marriage will seal peace forever between the two realms. Everyone bar Philip’s mom, Queen Ingrith (Pfeiffer), who has other plans. Basically, starting a war and blaming it on Maleficent, whose PR person must have been asleep since the first film, since Mal is now back to being generally despised. Ingrith then intends to use the fae genocide dust mentioned above to emerge victorious, allowing her to sweep in and annex the Moors.

Meanwhile in a sub-plot which is both superfluous and ham-handed, Maleficent is reconnecting with the family she never knew she had. Their leader is played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a fine actor. However, remember what I said about Jolie being born for the role? Ejiofor isn’t, and looks more embarrassed than anything else, to be stomping around in those oversized horns. It’s all filled with Obvious Commentary on bigotry, diversity, racism and so forth. Poor Maleficent is largely relegated to a supporting role in her own franchise, before returning to hurl green lightning at the end, and engage in some behaviour which can only be described as Christ-like. Have you a moment to talk about your lord and saviour, Angelina Jolie?

You can’t argue the $185 million budget was ill-spent though. Rønning was previously co-director on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, the [pauses to check notes] fifth installment in that franchise, and clearly knows his way around a nine-figure price-tag. It’s not enough to match its predecessor: more the kind of film I’ll dip into if I see it on cable, rather than rush to embrace on Blu-Ray.

Dir: Joachim Rønning
Star: Angelina Jolie, Michelle Pfeiffer. Elle Fanning, Harris Dickinson

Dead in the Water

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★★½
“Becalmed”

My heart sank in the first few seconds, when I discovered that this was a SyFy Original Movie. The really poor CGI, of a ship sailing on the ocean, seemed to confirm that I was in for one of their bottom of the barrel productions. In the end, however, this was… just about okay. Incredibly derivative, to be sure, and that’s not its only problem. Yet it still just about sustained my interest. That’s certainly not always the case for SyFy Original Movies, to put it mildly.

This takes place almost entirely on the not-so-good ship Amphitrite, an eco-warrior vessel engaged in tracking illegal Chinese trawlers. Its engine breaks down, right in the path of an incoming storm. They then pick up a survivor out of the water, who turns out to be infected with… something. Which is why he’s telling the crew, “Kill me… Then kill yourselves.” Needless to say, they don’t quite follow his suggestion. Before you can say “Alien rip-off“, they’re moving slowly around the dimly-lit corridors of the ship in search of… something. And before you can say “Thing rip-off,” they’re watching video off the survivor’s phone, and getting paranoid about who among them might, or might not, be infected.

It’s an all-female crew, which is why the film is here, and it’s admirable that no-one explicitly mentions this or makes a fuss about it. They are what they are, seven women who are competent at their jobs – and of course, it’s a reflection of the all-male cast in John Carpenter’s The Thing. The problem is that there isn’t enough effort put into differentiating them, or establishing them as individuals. I’m not certain I could tell you most of their names, or identify them even with a particular characteristic. I’m going to guess the one called “Sparks” was the ship’s engineer. Otherwise, they seemed entirely interchangeable.

The other problem was already mentioned in passing: the remarkable lack of lighting. Look, I get that the ship “lost power”. I understand that your creature budget of 15 South African Rand probably can’t stand up to the harsh glare of daylight. But there is a limit to how much sloth-like meandering along corridors by near-candlelight I can tolerate. And this film reaches that quota inside the first 30 minutes, then keeps right on meandering. Inevitably, the dwindling band of survivors eventually figure out what exactly they are going to do, and how they are going to stop the creature from reaching the all-you-can-infect buffet which is civilization. To the movie’s credit, it doesn’t shy away from the downbeat conclusion of The Thing, though as appears inevitable with SyFy Original Movies, there’s a coda which leaves the door open to a sequel no-one wants or needs.

In the end, the problem is as always: if you steal from the best, you’ll be compared to the best. And Dead in the Water comes up short of The Thing and Alien, by the width of several oceans.

Dir: Sheldon Wilson
Star: Nikohl Boosheri, Christia Visser, Tanya Van Geaan, Bianca Simone Mannie

Captain Marvel

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★★½
“Hardly marvel-lous”

I had a couple of potential concerns going into this. Firstly, my general unfamiliarity with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This was film #21 in their Infinity Saga. I had seen seven. Would this be like trying to follow Game of Thrones‘s penultimate episode, after having missed two-thirds of what preceded it? Secondly, Brie Larson’s press complaints about movie critics being “overwhelmingly white male.” Yep, guilty as charged, m’lord. Would this questionable attitude – that your skin colour and genital configuration matter more than what you do or say – carry over into the movie?

Fortunately, neither turned out to be a significant issue. On the other hand, it’s still not a very good movie.

Oh, it’s occasionally amusing and sometimes reaches the level of moderately impressive spectacle. But the longer it went on, the less involved I was in it. By the time Vers (Larson), a.k.a. Air Force pilot Carol Danvers enters goddess mode and becomes Captain Marvel, all I could think of was, “That’s a silly-looking helmet.” To reach that point, we follow her as alien Vers gets captured by the enemies of her Kree species, the Skrulls. Their brainwashing attempts succeed in partially re-awakening repressed memories of life on Earth as Danvers. The Krulls are after a light-speed engine being developed there by Danvers’s mentor, Dr. Wendy Lawson (Bening). It’s up to Vers to stop them. Except, almost nothing is quite what it seems at first.

My biggest complaint is how the film relies entirely on dramatically convenient amnesia. I found it painfully obvious, the way Vers’s memories repeatedly dribble back in exactly the manner most appropriate for the plot. The most important elements left are until last, because story-line. The period setting of 1995 turns out to be largely pointless, beyond an excuse to throw a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt onto Larson. [I’ll admit, we did pause the Blockbuster Video scene, to try and recognize some of the VHS sleeves, such as Hook and Jumping Jack Flash] It could just as easily have been set now, considering Marvel vanishes at the end, not returning until Avengers: Endgame, as a mid-credits sequence makes clear.

The above would have been okay if the action had been top-drawer, and it isn’t. This is probably the area in which Battle Angel kicks Captain Marvel’s ass the hardest: almost nothing here has any impact, physically or emotionally. Overall, it just feels lazy: look no further than the most obvious choice of  No Doubt’s Just a Girl as the backing track for the final fight. That was about as cringey as the empowerment got; rather more annoying was the political subtext, of “What if we were the real terrorists?” I watched this literally immediately after seeing Ricky Gervais’s beautifully savage assault on Hollywood at the Golden Globes: “You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world.” This film would seem to prove his point.

Dir: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck
Star: Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Annette Bening

Agent Jade Black

  By

★½
“Someone should go Black to basics.”

This originally was going to be included in my preview for the year, since it showed up in the IMDb with a release date of January 7, 2020. But on Googling, I found it already had seeped out on Tubi, a free movie channel. At time of writing, this would appear to be the first review written about it anywhere, though it should be considered less a preview than a dire advance warning. Indeed, I could condense the whole thing into one word: “Don’t.” For a more pedestrian, poorly-executed excuse for an action film, you’d be hard pushed to find. Right down to the initials of its lead character and the tag-line on the poster (right), this possesses aspirations it fails miserably to achieve. On the plus side, 2020 can really only go up from here.

Jade Black (Burgess) is a globe-trotting agent, working for a clandestine department of the US government under her boss, Malcolm (Flack). Initially tasked with bringing a scientist in from Italy, that mission goes pear-shaped, and the target killed. His laptop survives, and opens the door to a looming plot. He was working on a biological weapon known as “Juliet”, triggered by chemicals the body releases during sex. The shadowy Darrian group are plotting to use this, and the related antidote, for… the usual nefarious purposes in which shadowy groups in C-grade movies engage, including the release of Juliet at a political fundraiser. Front and center in opposition to Jade is Darrian operative Elle (Franklin), another former acolyte of Malcolm. Like Jade, she was rescued by him from sex traffickers as a teenager. Only, in Elle’s case, the psychological damage suffered was too great to overcome, and she went rogue instead.

The above actually sounds kinda interesting – certainly, considerably more so than it is in execution. Part of the problem is the resources are incapable of delivering anything the script asks of them. “Italy” for example, appears entirely depicted by the scientist using an espresso maker. There’s not even any token stock-footage of Rome. When your film is shot entirely in Oklahoma, why mention Italy at all? This kind of ludicrous over-reach peppers the whole movie, considering it can only depict Malcolm’s office by tacking a couple of maps to the wall of a generic room. Spears’ direction is also terrible, though it may be more of an editorial issue. Both individual shots and entire scenes appear to have been cut with a blunt butter-knife, ending too soon or going on too long.

There’s absolutely no rhythm or pacing, with the film lurching and juddering from one moment to the next, and the players exchange one-liners that are less groan-worthy than induce actual nausea. It rapidly becomes painful to watch, despite the best efforts of the cast, who aren’t as relentlessly terrible as the direction or writing. Franklin comes out best, sinking her teeth effectively into her bad-girl role. But you could have had Meryl Streep in this, and she would have been unable to salvage it.

Dir: Terry Spears
Star: Katie Burgess, Sidney Flack, Connie Franklin, Taylor Reich

Chokehold

  By

★★
“Gasping for air.”

I wanted to like this more than I did: director Skiba is a veteran of the Arizona film scene, though his other film previously covered here, .357: Six Bullets for Revenge, left a bit to be desired. This is slightly better; but only slightly. The heroine is Zoe (Croden), a mixed martial artist who is trying to make it big in Las Vegas. Her dad (Van Dien) is back in Arkansas, and crosses paths with Russian mobsters, led by Natalia (McCrea). It doesn’t end well. Let’s just say, if you’re watching this for Van Dien, you’ll quickly be underwhelmed. Zoe leaves Las Vegas, seeking justice for her father – naturally, the only way to get to Natalia is through her convenient underground fighting circuit…

It’s as if the writers were determined to check off every cliche of the genre in 95 minutes. If that was indeed their aim: well done. Outside of having a female protagonist, there is almost nothing new or of interest here, the story unfolding exactly as you’d expect after Van Dien collects his cheque. I think peak eye-rolling was unlocked when Zoe “discovers” a video letter left by her father. Fortunately, this narrative conceit was too much even for Skiba, and is quickly discarded. Even the depiction of the underground arena was painful, with blaring music from a DJ, and people doing that “waving their fists in the air during fights” thing, that you only see anyone do in movies.

All of the above would likely be fine, if the fights were any good, as Lady Bloodfight proved, overcoming its basic plot with a plethora of kick-ass action scenes. Certainly, there’s no shortage of action here. However, MMA style is not the same thing as kung-fu movie style: one isn’t necessarily better than the other, they’re just different. Here, instead of going for one or the other, they occupy an unfortunate middle-ground between realistic and non-realistic, and don’t work as either. The exception is a battle between Zoe and Natalia in a bar. Released from the constraints of being a “proper” fight, the makers get to have a bit more fun, e.g. kicking a bottle at your opponent – and as a result, so do the audience.

The producers of the film include two sports legends. However, they’re baseball players, Kenny Lofton and Torii Hunter, which makes mixed martial-arts seem like an off choice of topic. Probably wisely, they stay off-camera, and some credibility is lent by the presence of retired MMA star Chael Sonnen, playing a fight promoter. It isn’t enough to save this, as it limps through the motions towards the expected ending. The surprises end with the unexpectedly early departure of Van Dien. And even that’s more the result of his name being misleadingly front and centre on most of the advertising, rather than any conscious effort by the film itself. Despite the female focus, this is just another entry in the bargain bin of UFC-lite fight flicks.

Dir: Brian Skiba
Star: Melissa Croden, Ilona McCrea, Corinne Van Ryck de Groot, Casper Van Dien
a.k.a. Golden Dragon: Lady Bloodsport for a 2025 re-issue.

The Archer

  By

★★
“An arrowing experience.”

Lauren Pierce (Noble) is an expert archer, leading her high-school team. However, after she rescues a friend from sexual harassment, she finds herself on the wrong side of justice, and is sent to “Paradise Trails”, an incongruously-named juvenile detention facility, where harsh discipline and indefinitely extended sentences are the order of the day. And wouldn’t you know it, the place is run by a former Olympic archer – Bob Patrice (Sage) and his creepy son, Michael (Terry). It’s not long before Lauren is plotting an unofficial departure, along with new friend Becky (Mason), who knows the truth about what’s going on behind the scenes. When they get evidence proving it during their exit, they become the hunted as Bob and Michael will go to any lengths to stop the truth from getting out.

Opening with a claim about being “inspired by true events,” apparently that means the “kids for cash” scandal from Pennsylvania. While there’s nothing wrong with that as inspiration, it’s probably a mistake for the makers, apparently to want to make a serious statement, while adopting the tropes of the juvenile delinquent and women in prison genres. Brutal wardens; sadistic guards; lesbian subtexts… This all makes it kinda tough to take seriously, whatever statement they’re trying to make. And even that’s kinda muddied, beyond “sending kids to jail for bribes is bad.” Not much to argue with there. Probably more questionable, is the way every man here is an utter bastard. It gets kinda tiresome.

The main problem, however, is simply taking too long to get anywhere. The final 20 minutes or so, have Lauren and Becky trying to get through the wilderness around the facility, with Bob and Michael in pursuit. It’s well-crafted and tense, even if it builds to the inevitable final, bow-powered confrontation between Lauren and Bob, which you can see coming from a long way off. Unfortunately… it’s the final 20 minutes. The first hour are a real slog to get through, particularly the chunk after Lauren’s arrival at Paradise Trails. The script doesn’t have any real idea about where it needs to go or what it wants to do, once the basic concepts are established. As a result, it and the characters simply rotate gently in the wind, as interest evaporates gently.

There’s not even any real logic in the concept. Lauren is supposedly a “straight A’s” student with no previous record. Could have fooled me, going by the hyper-aggressive way she beats up on her pal’s boyfriend. That shows experience in the kicking of ass. Been nice if her ability to defend herself had come into play in the facility a bit more. Except, acknowledging women’s ability to be violent might have gone against the narrative apparently being peddled here. In that light, even the heroine’s use of a bow seems like some kind of liberal cop-out to avoid giving her the far more effective force multiplier of a fire-arm.

Dir: Valerie Weiss
Star: Bailey Noble, Bill Sage, Jeanine Mason, Michael Grant Terry

Ring Girls

  By

★★★
“Punches above its weight.”

This dates back from 2005, before Carano was a household name in the world of mixed martial arts, or a somewhat successful actress. At this point, she was only involved in the sport of muay thai, which as it’s name suggests, is a martial art originating in Thailand. She was one of five girls training in Las Vegas under Toddy – a nickname given because the teacher’s real name of Thohsaphol Sitiwatjana was too unpronounceable to Westerners! The goal of both Toddy and his students was a trip to Thailand to take on the best local practitioners of the sport. This “documentary” covers both their training and the visit itself, climaxing with Carano’s battle against the Thai champion.

Quotes are used advisedly around documentary, because of two elements – neither of which help the film. The first is some kind of beef, I’m guessing entirely fabricated, between Toddy and his brother “Master A”, who is a muay thai trainer back in Thailand. Apparently Toddy brought disrespect to the country by teaching their skills to foreign devils or something. [I think this may have been lifted from the life of Bruce Lee?] It’s a bit silly and pointless, but at least it can easily be ignored. Worse are the fake sounds added to the fights, when punches and kicks land. They’re not even well done, and rather than enhancing things, make the contests seem fake.

This is unfortunate, as there’s otherwise a lot to like here. Even though an unknown at the time, you can see why the film focuses on Carano, who is clearly not just the best fighter, even to my amateur eyes, she is also the most charismatic. Sometimes, this works against it: we barely get to learn the results of the other four fights in Thailand. But it mainly helps, like a low-budget movie which lucks into starring a future Oscar winner [hello, Cyborg 2!]. And despite the post-audio’s relentless attempts to derail things, the fights are quite impressive, with the impact of the blows apparent purely from the visual side, such as the reaction of the punchee.

It all makes for a rather inconsistent blend of fact and fiction, and everyone involved would have been better served by deciding in which camp they stood. If fictional, develop a better narrative, with setbacks (at the risk of spoilering, I’m not sure we see any of the girls ever lose a match). Or go strictly factual, and use the time spent on things like Toddy’s family issues, perhaps to give us deeper background on the fighters. Heck, more info on the Thai women would have been welcome, too, comparing and contrasing life in Bangkok to Las Vegas. However, you should not let these criticisms put you off watching this (I stumbled across it on Amazon Prime), as it’s still an interesting insight into the tough world of women (or the world of tough women?) in martial arts.

Dir: Jennifer Ferrara + Thomas Weber
Star: Gina Carano, Master Toddy, Ardra Hernandez, Lisa King

Hostile

  By

★★★
“We are the monsters.”

After an un-specified global apocalypse, humanity is reduced to small bands of scattered survivors, who have to try and scratch out survival, while avoiding the attacks of “reapers”, mutated creatures which stalk the landscape, especially after dark. One of those survivors is Juliette (Ashworth), who is on a foraging mission in the desert when an accident throws her off the road, and leaves her with a badly-broken leg. She has to wait for help to arrive, fending off the reaper (Botet) which is prowling the area, with whatever she can find to hand. As she does so, she thinks about life before the apocalypse, where she escaped drug addiction with the help of her boyfriend, gallery owner Jack (Fitoussi) – only for happiness to be fleeting, and taken away from her when multiple tragedies strike.

Initially, the structure bugged the hell out of me. Just when tension was being ramped up, with Juliette in peril and having to cope with a host of issues, simply to survive, we’d suddenly flash back to mundane reality, and thoroughly unconvincing chat between her and Jack. This happened on multiple occasions, and I was left wondering what the relevance of it all was. Beyond her apparent issues with reading, there seemed to be little or no connection. Finally, at the end, you suddenly get the point. While it’s quite a touching revelation, and the ending in undeniably poignant, I’m not sure it was enough to counter all the irritation the approach generated earlier.

The other problem, is that Turi is considerably better at the action/horror aspects, than at relationship drama. It’s a while before we see the first reaper. Juliette’s first encounter with one takes place inside a caravan where she foraging; the camera remains outside and, brilliantly, we only see the impact of her battle with the creature on the caravan, as well as hearing it, of course. When we finally see one, it lives up to what our imagination has crafted, and is creepy as hell. That’s thanks mostly to Botet’s fine work as a “body actor,” along the lines of Doug Jones. In contrast, there’s little or no wallop packed by the scenes involving Juliette and Jack, which are closer to bad soap-opera.

As noted, you eventually understand why, yet I can’t help thinking there were better ways to handle it. While necessary exposition, front-loading all the set-up, rather than spreading it out through the film, and doing so more efficiently, would perhaps have helped. I’d rather have seen how we got there from here (“there” being the post-apoc world, in case it’s not clear), than rehash every detail of what’s clearly a doomed relationship. If we’d had the reaper stalking her over an extended period, that might also have helped credibility in terms of the final revelation, and a bit more likeability for the heroine would have been welcome. As is, the good here is really good; it’s unfortunately countered by a number of significant issues.

Dir: Mathieu Turi
Star: Brittany Ashworth, Gregory Fitoussi, Javier Botet

Immortal Fist: The Legend of Wing Chun

  By

★★
“So, is there, like, an anime convention in town or something?”

The above quote does suggest that the makers here appreciate how ridiculous the entire thing is. And that self-awareness may be the main thing which saves this from being largely cringeworthy. Just because you can make a fantasy kung-fu film with no budget, and largely filmed in a Californian park, doesn’t mean you should make a fantasy kung-fu film, etc. etc. Kaya (Caminiti) is your normal high-school girl. Except for being adopted, parents unknown. And the recurring dreams about martial arts battles. And the four mystical guardians who follow her around. And, it turns out, that she’s the great-granddaughter of the original Wing Chun (Bennett), and her last surviving descendant. Evil forces are intent on ending the bloodline; the guardians try to stop them, while attempting to convince Kaya to… er, get her arm cut off so she can claim her mystical birth-right and resulting mad skillz.

There are some interesting ideas here, such as the notion we live in some kind of Matrix-styled VR multiverse. But there are just too many mis-steps – and ones which would have been easily avoidable, and are unrelated to the lack of resources. For instance, why the guardians take the form of young, thoroughly non-Asian Americans, could have been explained away with a quick line or two about adopting the best shape to blend in to modern society. Nope. There are way too many loose ends that go nowhere as well, such as Kaya’s school pals. This is all the more irritating, because the film ends with absolutely nothing of significance having been resolved: it’s an attempt at delivering a cliffhanger, which is staggeringly unsatisfying.  I hate that nonsense when books pull it, and it’s no better here. Especially as this runs only 73 minutes, even including all those superfluous loose ends. Tighten it up, and give us a proper, complete story. If we want a sequel, we’ll let you know: don’t tell us.

However, I actually quite liked the performances here: Caminiti is a winning heroine, with a dry reaction to the increasingly bizarre situation in which she finds herself. The guardians, led by Tai Fong (director Beyer), have an amusing mix of personalities, but it’s Bennett as Wing Chun who manages to steal the film, despite only having a few scenes – she’s taking proceedings far more seriously than they probably deserve, and elevates the whole thing as a result. Technically, it’s not bad, with some interesting use of filters and colour in the “other” realm. In the end, this is not much more than a glorified fan film, with aspirations clearly well in excess of its ability to deliver. As an apparent first feature, there’s something to build on, yet I suspect it might have been better released as a web series. This could have helped address some of the more obvious flaws, and perhaps found the cult following to which it seems to aspire.

Dir: Lon Beyer
Star: Silvana Caminiti, Lon Beyer, Josh Fesler, Elle Bennett

Terminator: Dark Fate

  By

★★½
“She’ll not be back”

If you went back in time, and told James Cameron on the set of the original Terminator, that 35 years later, it would have spawned six movies and a TV series, he probably wouldn’t have believed you. It’s not a story which screams “Franchise,” being entirely self-contained. The first sequel justified itself with a sea-change in digital effects which marked a massive shift in the way popular cinema would work thereafter. Everything beyond that? Almost entirely superfluous. And I speak as someone who liked Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines considerably more than most people.

I can certainly see why this flopped though. It comes on the heels of Salvation and Genesys, both of which were commercially dubious and critically disastrous, to the point that Cameron decreed them to have happened in alternate universes, effectively retconning them out of existence. This set Dark Fate up as a direct sequel to the franchise’s most successful installment, which also happens to be one of the greatest action films of all time (it’s likely in my top five, and not the only James Cameron film there either). Comparisons were never going to be kind to Dark Fate.

Then, Miller opens his film with footage from T2, in which an amazingly intense Sarah Connor describes her vision of Judgment Day. Rather than trying to build the movie’s own universe, the audience is immediately reminded of just how damn good its predecessor was. I turned to Chris and whispered, “We really must watch T2 again.” This is not something you should be thinking, thirty seconds into a sequel. It’s just the first in a number of missteps which end up burying the franchise once again, rather than resurrecting it.

The main problem is, we’ve seen it all before. The story is basically the same as Terminator. Or Terminator 2. Or Terminator 3. Robot gets sent back in time by future self-aware AI to kill a human it deems is a threat. Pro-mankind asset gets sent back in time to protect the target. They fight. A lot. There are a couple of wrinkles here. The protector (Davis) is actually an “augmented” human herself, albeit still short of the levels of her enemy (Luna). And Dani Ramos (Reyes) isn’t the mother of someone who’ll save humanity. But it feels less a sequel than a reboot, as we still have to watch Dani going through the whole explanatory process and “Five stages of being a Terminator target” thing.

Probably the main hook, however, is the presence of both Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger, re-united for the first time since T2. Cue another misstep: if their appearances had been unexpected twists, they would both have come as delightful surprises. And the way they are filmed, makes it feel like that may have been the original intent. For instance, when Sarah Connor makes her entrance, we see her feet getting out of the car, the mysterious saviour only eventually revealed. The same is true when the T-800 arrives. Except those bullets were already fired by marketing, with them both showing up, full face, in the trailers. And it’s never explained why a 100% artificial creature like the T-800 has aged 35 years, nor how it’s getting the information with which it helps Sarah.

The familiarity of the plot would be bearable, if the execution was up to much. After all, T2 recycled its plot to a not dissimilar degree. However, it pushed the spectacle to 11, and was superior to the original as a result. This… Did not. Indeed, I was shocked by how ropey much of the CGI and digital work was, for a $190 million budget. Not so much the new Rev-9 model Terminator, which is a slick, oily creation like an intelligent pool of tar. But the meshing with the actors is poor, especially when one or other is made to fly through the air.

Maybe this kind of thing works in superhero films like Miller’s Deadpool. Here, it falls well short of the physical impact we saw in T2, or even T3, where the bathroom brawl felt like it had a bone-crunching realism to it. The low-point here is a battle on a plummeting plane, which is so poorly shot, edited and even lit as to be entirely incoherent. You literally have no idea which was is up, and I was simply left waiting for it to be over, and figure out what happened based on who walks away from the wreckage. [Spoiler: it’s everyone]

The entry isn’t entirely without merit though. While Dani is no Sarah Connor v2.0 (and her brother is worse still, quickly triggering a Chris whisper to me, “I hope he dies soon…”), Sarah 1.0 has a tired cynicism which is endearing and understandable. Maybe if they’d made the film entirely about Connor, spending her life going from place to place, hunting and destroying Terminators? There could then have been a whole slew of styles of opponent, making it the Godzilla: Final Wars entry in the franchise. Arnie, too, possesses a charisma which is mostly notable by its absence from the rest of the cast, though Davis makes a better impression than I feared.

There’s also a brilliant sequence set thirty years ago, depicting a young Sarah and John Connor, which is so well done, I was left wondering if this was unused footage from T2. Again, I’m left to wonder if they should have embraced that wholeheartedly and had the entire film take place in that era. We might then have avoided the SJW beats e.g. Border Patrol = bad, though at least these are relatively light compared to some recent Hollywood product. Well, save the clumsy way Dani becomes the future messiah, which triggered derisive snorting from my direction.

It would be a stretch to say we were storming the box-office, demanding a refund. We don’t see many films at the cinema, and despite my criticisms, this did not feel like we wasted our time or our money. It does deliver, as a cinematic spectacle, and is certainly an improvement over Salvation and Genesys, both of which triggered actual sleep. Yet I was reminded of a definition of insanity: repeating the same actions, over and over, hoping for a different result. It appears making Terminator sequels potentially qualifies.

Dir: Tim Miller
Star: Natalia Reyes, Mackenzie Davis, Linda Hamilton, Gabriel Luna