On with the quick hits!
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbes and Shaw– I liked this way more than I thought I would. Dwayne Johnson can make just about anything work and the pairing of him and Jason Statham as Shaw is a potent mix. Statham has done a lot of action movies and his best role is Shaw. Giving him the foil of Hobbes makes his character work at his most surly and best. The set up to give them their own duo movie is easy: a biological weapon is on the loose, Hobbes is put on the case and Shaw’s sister is the rogue agent so Shaw is pulled into the save the world orbit. With Fast and Furious in the title, it checks all the boxes of the franchise. I liked the escalation of action, it works it’s way up to cartoon levels pretty late in the film. The movie also tries to be funny all the time and sometimes succeeds. Your mileage will vary in how much you laugh as Hobbes and Shaw’s bickering is always stupid and goofy. I don’t think I’m saying anything surprising in the 9th movie of a nearly twenty-year-old series. Silly fun, one of the better entries in the series.
X-Men: Dark Phoenix– This movie got absolutely trashed when it came out. I can honestly say, it’s not a bad movie. The problem is that it never gets any better than ‘good’ making it a movie that you can skip and not miss anything. The X-Men film franchise is a weird one. It has more misses than hits. A reboot of sorts started in 2011 with First Class while Wolverine got his own movies where only one of those was worth watching. Then 2014, Days of Future Past was a solid entry, everyone hated Apocalypse in 2016 and Dark Phoenix tries to do something worthwhile in the last entry of this cast before Disney/Marvel takes the rains.
The problem is, the story in this is far too simple and for as big as the cast is, there aren’t enough characters to care about. Many characters have very little to do–they are there for action scenes–they say very little and even have nothing to say (I don’t think Quicksilver speaks at all and then gets injured). So they feel like a waste. Mystique is a major character but she’s so different from her comic book self that it feels wrong. Jennifer Lawrence does everything she can with what she’s given but it’s hard to care about it. It doesn’t help that the previous movie wasn’t good so there’s a large gap of when anyone cared about her or any of these characters. Sophie Turner does her best work as Jean, she’s got the best scenes with James McAvoy as Professor X. Nicholas Holt is the other highlight as Hank but his scenes are too few and far between.
Everything whips by quickly and after two hours it doesn’t feel like anything with weight happens. At the beginning Jean gets–possessed is I guess the best word to use for it–and she starts to lose control of her now greatly amplified powers. It seems to be triggered by anger, which isn’t interesting. She runs off, a fight to bring her back happens, she finds out a secret about her past that Professor X has kept from her making her madder. It’s there that the best and more important conflict is and not enough is done with it. Her teammates, who have known her for years show basic concern for her, but no time is spent with them.
The worst is the alien antagonists that are boring and come across as a tacked-on afterthought. They show up out of nowhere and the absolute minimal amount of information about them and their motives are given in the entire story. So you don’t care about them. They became the fodder for the last action scene of the movie. And while that action scene is fantastic, the final showdown with Jean and head baddie is anti-climatic and dull. The end doesn’t land as well as it should so the movie and this franchise feels like it simply fades away, just in time for the credits to roll. Really disappointing.
Eli– Available on Netflix, this one turned out to be a lot of fun. Eli is a young boy with a severe auto-immune disease. He’s basically allergic to everything, he breaks out into a red rash and can’t breathe. If he goes outside, he has to wear a hazmat suit to keep himself safe. After years of living in a plastic bubble, his parents have found a doctor who specializes in his condition and they travel to her converted home for the cure. Along with the doctor and her two nurses, they are the only people in the sanitary facility…until Eli is visited by a dark presence on the first night. All the adults don’t believe what Eli is telling them and he has to piece together what’s going on by himself.
As you can see those are some classic horror setups. The build-up to the haunted house is quite good and there are some genuinely creepy and tense scenes with Eli being on his own at night. During the day isn’t much better has he is put through stressful procedures by the doctor. Night and day the kid is physically and emotionally tested. I really liked the reveal of what is going on, I was tricked twice before it all comes together. Well done direction and special effects make each moment stand out and believable. I especially love the end with a great payoff that sets up a very different sequel. I’m totally on board to see where this team of filmmakers would go with it. Gore and violence are kept to a minimum with the most intense visuals (that are really impressive) kept for the end. I think it’s tastefully done and fitting for a climax. Smart move as I think being more restrained makes this more approachable to a bigger audience.
Good Boys– Max, Lucas, and Thor are best friends starting the sixth grade. Peer pressure to be cool and grow up as fast as possible is in full effect. When Max manages to get all of them invited to the cool kid’s party (it’s kissing party!) it triggers the race to find out how to kiss a girl before the party. That snowballs into losing a drone, skipping school, getting mixed up with drugs and chased around town by angry high school girls.
This movie was way better than I thought it would be. It’s a fitting title, the kids are good boys and most of the laughs come from the innocence of eleven-year-olds confidently claiming they know everything. It’s a time when puberty starts for many, everything and everyone around you is changing and “leaving” childhood behind seems like the thing to do. The kids are great, it feels like they’ve known each other their whole lives and watching them curse through the whole crazy ordeal is a blast. The funny thing is that kids the age of the main characters aren’t the audience for this, there is cursing all over the place and sex jokes stuffed everywhere possible. It’s kind of like a tamer version of The Hangover. The line of going too far is skated up to but never crossed. There is a lot of cursing, but it’s not mean tirades or gross. There’s no violence. There’s just situational absurdity about friends going through a day they will never forget and they all learn about themselves at the end of it. A big and pleasant surprise, I recommend it.