Greetings!
Yes, I’m still alive. I hope everyone is staying safe and staying informed during these interesting state of affairs in the year 2020. What was once an incredibly promising year for film has spiraled into an age of uncertainty, as COVID-19 kind of threw a massive pandemical wrench in everyone’s life plans.
That also explains why I haven’t posted much, simply because all the films I was looking forward to seeing were postponed or delayed indefinitely. Luckily, HBO Max recently came out so I’ve been binging a lot of movies there (anticipate a lengthy future post about this!)
So because these are unique and unusual times, I’ve decided to do a unique and unusual double feature review of two films. Before I get into that, I’d like to set up some context for my reasons behind seeing these films.
Prior to everything going bonkers this year, I set a mildly serious but stupid New Years resolution for myself: watch more bad movies. When I was a teenager, I would watch anything that interested me based on the trailers I saw, or the posters promoting the film, basically all your conventional vehicles for advertisement. I soon realized that I was watching a lot of garbage, so I switched gears going into college. I figured that the best way of mitigating the risk of seeing bad films would be to only see movies with high ratings. I still believe in that to a degree even now, where movies with high RottenTomatoes or Metacritic ratings generally end up being more enjoyable than those with low scores. I know, I’m one of those people.
As I’ve gotten older, I kind of know what I like at this point, but I also know that I’m not too adventurous with the films I see. If it has a bad rating, I generally steer clear of it unless I have a bunch of close friends who recommend it to me (this has never happened.) So in comes my resolution for this year. I made a goal for myself to watch one poorly reviewed movie from each month, to give “bad” movies a chance. I wanted to see if my bias was truly tied to a score, or to my surprise find a very hidden gem in the rough. I wanted to see if this resolution would make me become a staunch defender of several poorly reviewed films, or affirm the belief I’ve had for many years now, that garbage movies will be garbage. This resolution also serves a dual purpose—to know how good I’ve had it. Most of the reasons I dislike certain films are generally not objectively or blatantly obvious, but more due to preference. Watching more bad movies would help a film lover such as myself see how good I’ve had it, where I’ve had the luxury of not enjoying high quality and well made films. I was equally excited and equally terrified of this goal, because I didn’t know what to expect.
I had three movies lined up for January through March, and that’s when COVID-19 happened.
Since then, I haven’t kept track of things to see since everything got postponed, but I promise I’ll pick up this resolution when and if the world ever returns back to normal. For now, I’ve knocked out 2 of the 3 movies that I set out to watch: Bloodshot and The Rhythm Section. I saw Bloodshot a few months ago, and thought it was terrible and didn’t want to write about it then. I’ve blocked most of it out from my memory at this point, but I’ll try to give a brief review of it anyways.
I’ve never been a big fan of Vin Diesel, as I think he is one of Hollywood’s most one-dimensional actors. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing when you have films that cater to the one-dimensionality of your lead actor. However, Bloodshot suffers from the same symptoms of every mediocre sci-fi film, which is trying to take too many elements from greater sci-fi films and mashing them together into one. This movie tries to take a lot of aspects from The Matrix, Minority Report, and even RoboCop. It’s a bit of a jumbled mess that actually starts out pretty well. As soon as they introduce the first “twist” of the film, that’s when it just continuously shoots itself in the foot, one lame plot element after another. I really like Guy Pearce and I enjoyed Eiza Gonzalez quite a bit in this film, and they honestly deserve better. Some parts are just so cheesy and try so hard to be dramatic, but they just end up falling flat on all accounts.
The film also acts like it discovered slow motion. Every single fight had so much slow motion, and you could tell shots were deliberately set up so that the slow motion would “enhance” it. It’s a really outdated visual trick that should be used sparingly at this point when it comes to action. There were several moments in this film where I thought I was watching a poorly constructed John Woo film from the early 90s.
Bloodshot was easily one of the worst films I had seen in a good while. None of the characters were likable, and the story just kept meandering between generic sci-fi plots that were done way better in other movies. For that, I’d give it…
Grade: C-/60
Naturally, I was fearful of how much worse the rest of the films I had lined up were gonna be. Well, I finally mustered up the courage to watch The Rhythm Section last night, and well…
IT WAS SO FREAKIN’ BORING. GOOD LORD. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a film so audaciously boring. The film revolves around a perfectly normal woman named…Stephanie I think? To be honest, I’ve almost forgotten everything about her 12 hours later. Anyways, I think it’s Stephanie. The film revolves around a perfectly normal woman who has her life turned upside down when tragic events happen to her family, which is established very early on in the film. What ISN’T established however, is why she is so broken up about it, other than the fact that they’re her family and obviously losing loved ones is tough. I get it, that’s generally enough reason to cause a character in a story to grieve, as it would for us in real life. However in this film, the film tries to make you invested in the relationship between Lively’s character and her family. How do they do that, you ask? By playing the same muted scene OVER AND OVER. The film opens with shots of Stephanie and her family enjoying a nice evening together, playing cards and enjoying each other’s company. There’s dialogue, but you can’t hear it.
That’s it.
You don’t see any additional scenes of Stephanie’s parents. It’s almost as if that’s the only fond memory Stephanie has of them. You don’t hear them talk, you don’t see them argue, you don’t see them kiss and make up. You just see the same flashback scenes over and over, and it literally does nothing to make you invested in her backstory. I swear I think they played the same scene like three or four times to make you really care about her loss, but 40 minutes into the film, I didn’t know anything more about Stephanie than I did in the first 40 seconds. And that’s tough, when you consider that the loss of her family members are the entire backstory for the protagonist.
The direction of this film is also really…really weird. It’s not a long film, clocking in at just under two hours. I think a good 30-40 minutes is dedicated to Blake Lively sitting in a corner or lying on the ground looking despondent and helpless. There are so many repeated shots of her just staring off into the distance. Why are there so many scenes of this? It’s like the director Reed Morano didn’t know how else to convey that our character was a deeply troubled person.
The musical scoring of this film was also insanely odd. What’s even stranger is that Hans Zimmer was an executive producer for the music in this film. Either Zimmer fell on his head during the production of this movie, or that title really means nothing at all, because this film has hands down the strangest choices of music put into a cerebral action thriller. The tone of this film is so somber throughout, so it’s incredibly jarring when the movie decides to play really upbeat, poppy, and jazzy songs at the most random points of the film. It’s like someone’s Spotify playlist managed to leak through the film. It was a truly baffling choice of songs, and the only purpose it served was to jolt me awake whenever the rest of the film would keep putting me to sleep.
At it’s core, I think the idea of an amateur spy plotting revenge and taking it into her own hands is interesting. There are scenes of her failing to do what we often take for granted when someone like James Bond executes it perfectly. I like the idea of someone stumbling to do something we think in our heads is so easy, and it helps to see how much training it requires to take on dangerous tasks. However, everything surrounding this film is just so poorly constructed and presented that you are just so mentally checked out not even halfway through the movie. The protagonist is completely forgettable, as is her story. I really had to fight hard to get through this movie, because of how uninteresting it was. The film really comes off like it wants you to realize how epic it is, especially how it overindulges in scenes that superior thrillers would know how to manage. There are so many shots in this film where you can almost feel the director going “Yeah…isn’t this cool? Isn’t this movie awesome?” No. No it is not.
Grade: D/50
Well that’s all I have for now, stay tuned to when I review my last “bad movie” planned for the year…Fantasy Island. I just shuddered at the thought of watching it. Give me a few weeks to recover from this movie. But stay tuned for my other post regarding HBO Max! I’m looking forward to writing that one. Stay safe, everyone!
No Trailers. 