Change Your Image
billypilgrim23
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
Run All Night (2015)
Seen it a thousand times
Another standard run-of-the-mill action movie.
You have your ex mob hit-man who is sucked back into the life-cliché. You have your car chase, your bad guys who cant hit a target no matter how many times they fire. You have your corrupt cops and your hero who kills a few hundred people and then kills the boss that he used to work for.
Nothing original to be found anywhere. Generic acting, generic dialogue, generic everything.
If you like to see the same movie you have seen a gazillion times, watch it, you will not be disappointed.
If you want to see something new, avoid at all costs.
John Wick (2014)
Cliché, boring, seen it before.
Keanu Reeves is a super-hit-man, who has retired but is forced back for one more job etc etc etc. It sounds familiar because it is exactly like the other countless cliché action movies you have ever seen.
There is exactly nothing original in this movie. He is the best hit-man ever, retires, then his wife dies and some Russian gangster kills his dog so now he has to avenge the dog, killing an entire army of gangsters and eventually the boss. Along the way he gets the help of an old friend in the business who is killed by the boss blah blah blah.
Reeves does his usual thing where he acts exactly the same as in every other Reeves-movie. Seriously, this guy has no range at all.
The boss is the most incompetent gangster-boss in history, has an obnoxious spoiled son who screws everything up etc.
Boring, done a million times, every cliché in the book is used to create a generic, dime a dozen action movie.
Only worth it if you're new here. 3/10
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
Complete shameless milking of the franchise
A Hobbit holding a ring has to make a perilous journey to a far-away land on a realm-saving mission, aided by Dwarfs, Elves and Gandalf and hunted by Orcs.
Sound familiar? It should because it is the exact same movie (spread out over three three-hour movies again) you already saw in Lord of the Rings.
Only this time there is a dragon.
Who talks a lot. Doesn't kill much even though he is supposed to be omnipotent. Cant seem to handle a bunch of tiny Dwarfs. But he will talk to them. A lot.
The hunting-party of terrifying Orcs gets massacred by a guy and a gal Elf. The Orcs don't manage to kill a single soul, although Orlando Bloom does end up with a nose-bleed.
If you retain any memory of LOTR, don't watch this because it is certain to annoy and bore you.
2/10 for completely copying LOTR and milking the franchise unscrupulously, but has some decent effects.
Under the Skin (2013)
Intriguing and original
Don't be discouraged by the bad reviews and low score of this film. Normally I don't appreciate people saying "well you just didn't get it" to people who don't like movies that are 'different', but in this case it seems a lot of people really "did not get it".
This movie doesn't present answers to all questions in a bite-size, ease-to-swallow format, one has to actually think a little. It seems a lot of people don't like that (big surprise there). You will see in a lot of negative reviews people saying things like "half the audience left in the theater I was in so it must suck", "there was no character arc", or asking things like "who were these motorcycle-men and what were they doing?". These are people who don't like thinking and/or paying attention.
The story can be grasped quite easily by all that was shown, and it was shown in a beautiful way. In a disturbing way sometimes (baby on the beach), and in a subtle way oftentimes.
Good effort by the director, good performance by SJ and the men-victims who were being filmed by hidden camera and were unaware they were gonna be in a movie.
Was going to give a 7/10 but an extra point for disturbing me with the baby-scene. 8/10
The Strain (2014)
Kindergarten-level plot
Unfortunately, another show that could've been decent has been ruined by horrific writing. To give a few examples- 1. A plane lands and goes black, no communications etc, it just sits there and has to be entered by law-enforcement. So who do they send in first? Special forces? DHS? SWAT? No, they send a guy and a girl from the CDC in there.. Right, standard procedure. 2. Before Mr and Mrs CDC go in, two air-traffic controllers decide to investigate and approach the plane (Why not right?). As they stand there marvelling at the craft, one remarks "Whoa, it's really a lot bigger than on my screen".. Like he never saw a plane before.. Works at an airport. 3. The other guy -his boss- says to him "This is bad, we have a dead plane."
The cast consists of a workaholic whose wife leaves him, bad guys with German accents, the old know-it-all Jew, etc.etc.
One giant amalgamation of cliché's.
Avoid it.
The Leftovers (2014)
Many can't stand not understanding I guess
Lots of very negative reviews after 4 episodes so far. Strange, since this show started well. Seems to me many of the reviewers are having problems with not understanding everything yet- "what is this deal with the smokling guys in white? I don't get it".
For some of us, living with some mystery that we hope will be understood later is fun, not for everyone I guess.
Dialogue is good, acting is good. Characters have potential.
This show could be good, we wont know for a while, but don't let the negative reviewers scare you off, let's give it a chance and see where it takes us.
K-9 (1989)
Soulless
Soulless piece of hackery concerning a particularly unsympathetic police-man who gets a dog as a partner.
Every single "joke" in the movie is a cliché that's been done a gazillion times before. Belushi cannot act and fails to prevent his real-life shitty personality from manifesting on screen. Couple that with generic directing, crappy script, mediocre acting- it were better had this movie never been made.
A total turd of a film.
Belushi is a real jack-ass.
The dog was OK.
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
Excruciatingly boring and not going nowhere.
A movie in which absolutely nothing at all happens to a thoroughly unsympathetic jerk you won't connect with.
There is no storyline, no character arc, nothing happens at all to anybody. Which isn't too bad since you won't care about any of the characters.
The musical performances by the lead jack-ass are mediocre and without any real talent. Unfortunately he plays the entire songs. Some he will play twice.
What were the Coen brothers thinking? I have no clue. This movie is a terrible failure and will be sure to disappoint any discerning viewers.
Avoid at all costs. 1/10
The Happening (2008)
Yes, it's bad. Really bad.
First of all, I have nothing against Shyamalan, so I'm not a "hater", whatever that is. I thought Sixth Sense was good and I enjoyed Signs, even though I didn't think it was particularly good.
This movie though.. Everything about it is pretty awful. The script, the acting, the plot. Awful. So bad in fact it made me wonder whether or not it was on purpose. I mean Wahlberg and Deschanel are competent actors normally, not awesome, but competent enough. Not here. Admittedly they have little to work with as the dialogue is horrendous, but even their facial expressions are just bad.
Best performance of the movie goes to the random construction-worker at the beginning.
It made me feel weird watching this movie as it's all so out of joint. Take the opening scene. A woman on a park-bench looks off into the distance and says "my god, are those people clawing at themselves?". Nobody is clawing at themselves in this movie... At all. Just weird.
Maybe OK for a lazy Sunday afternoon, high on pot. Otherwise, avoid at all costs.