mica404 Reviews

The Marvels (2023)

Disturbingly bad

[5/10 · 8 February 2024]

I Really wanted to like this, especially as all 3 characters had appealed in their initial outings (Even Monica Rambeau's small part in Wandavision). I took the reviews with a grain if salt as usual for a MCU film as usual, but this time they were spot on.

The plot is nonsensical at times. Examples of which being: The characters powers' entanglement inexplicably going away, and the inclusion of characters to no purpose (What did Kamala's family actually do besides run around screaming).

The Villain is bland and ultimately weak, so we are denied a fun confrontation to paper over the cracks. In a way, the true villain is Carol's own impetuousness as her actions set the whole sequence of events into motion.

Changes to prior events are just handwaved to suit the story. Kamala doesn't need to wear her band. It is explicitly explained in her series that its only role was in awakening her abilities. Also when her Great Grandmother and Great Aunt found it in India, they had expected to find both, so how did the other one turn up on the moon?

Finally, as posted in another review, has the death Of Stan Lee led to a 'Disneyfication' of the MCU, like having a song and dance number in this film.

The Gray Man (2022)

Style over substance

[6/10 · 25 October 2023]

This has most of the elements of a great film, but isn't. Good cast including A listers who do a decent enough job with what they've been given.

In particular, with Chris Evans playing against type, chewing the scenery as a psychotic 'contractor' is nice if a total caricature. There are also some good action set pieces, and the stunt work is decent if not enough to justify the budget,

The main issue is the story. It ends very unsatisfactorily with Denny, The real villain of the piece getting away unscathed, with many of the rest of the cast dying around him. The people behind the film thought 6 getting away alive was a satisfactory outcome; it isn't.

Overall it is worth watching as a fun ride, but expect no more.

Heart of Stone (I) (2023)

Unrealised potential leading to poor film

[4/10 · 30 August 2023]

This could have been good, but they got everything wrong. The extended introduction contains little to no exposition, instead it is spent building characters. Pretty engaging. They then kill off the more interesting pair, undoing the bulk of that work. It goes downhill from there, lots of action, but offering little motivation or explanation for what is happening. You have to look very closely to see why anything is happening. You make Sophie Okonedo an important character, then seal her away for the entire third act. The whole cards thing is introduced with no explanation. Then characters are introduced and then quickly killed off (like the King of clubs) for no reason, except to move the plot along. The 'hero' wins and it is over.

There is potentially a good film here, but this is definitely not it.

The Wheel of Time (2021– )

Failed Adaptation

[4/10 · 10 January 2022]

Its a fine line to tread when adapting a book series to another medium. Simply it comes down to: what to keep, what to lose and what to change. With a series as large and complex as the Wheel of Time its especially true. The series was seen as unadaptable, being in development for nearly 20 years

Here the writers are not up to the challenge. They have changed too much, often to no purpose; which is likely to alienate most of the books' fans. At the same time they've taken out too much necessary exposition, leaving behind a confused mess that is likely to confuse other viewers.

In the end this gets a 4 mostly for the visuals, but everything else is really bad. The only positive is that the books are unaffected by all this.

Tom and Jerry (II) (2021)

Purely for kids.

[4/10 · 8 September 2021]

This isn't a bad film as such. But the best childrens' films have material written for their parents. This doesn't, so I lost interest after about 20 minutes and skimmed the rest.

The Watch (2020–2021)

Dire

[2/10 · 19 August 2021]

This is supposed to be inspired by Pratchett. I saw the raft of bad reviews and took them as a challenge to try the show. If you think something similar; don't bother, It really is that bad. The Showmaker's idea of inspiration is to take a few names at random from different books (4 books in the first 10 minutes) and change everything that was good about the originals. Then replace the setting with a vastly inferior one

The show would be bad even without the Pratchett Connection. But using his name makes the show unwatchable for anyone who knows the source material.

Army of the Dead (2021)

Unrelentingly Grim

[4/10 · 27 May 2021]

The film is overlong and has few if any redeeming qualities. Another recent reviewer did a: 'Things we learned from this film' list. It could be reduced down to 1: If somewhere has been overrun with Zombies; don't go in. What you get is 2 1/2 hours of death and gore with no survivors that could have been done in much less time.

The protagonist's estranged daughter goes in for mostly altruistic reasons and survives. Unfortunately, she goes in to rescue a friend, and while she succeeds in that, het friend dies in a helicopter crash shortly afterwards. And while she patches things up with her father, she has to kill him. And she tends to fare better than the rest of the characters.

Add in: an overly convoluted plot with core ideas unexplained, a mole (who's comeuppance is diluted by the fact that almost everyone else dies), treachery and backstabbing along the way, and an attempt at an open ending that falls flat. It all leads to an overcomplicated mess of a film.

The Mandalorian: Chapter 16: The Rescue (2020) Season 2, Episode 8

Unexpected but wonderful

[10/10 · 9 April 2021]

This was a great series finale even before the reveal at the end, and the stinger (watch it, its mainly a preview, but done so well). I have to admit that I didn't get the reveal even as the X wing appeared. Rather, part of me got it, but the rest was going 'they can't could they', but after Ahsoka appearing earlier in the season I should have known better.

My only worry is that after the emotions of this episode (season), they don't have anywhere left to go, but for once I just have to trust the creators.

Lastly, like many other reviewers, I have to wonder why the best Star Wars Material is outside the main movies and why don't Disney/Lucasfilm allow Jon and Dave take on the films.

Artemis Fowl (2020)

Depressingly Dire

[3/10 · 14 June 2020]

This is a truly bad film. The plot is illogical, more a series of loosely connected events, with no real structure or purpose.The cast is largely inexperienced, and put in lacklustre performances. There are exceptions, but are either not long on screen (Colin Farrell) or miscast (Judy Dench). In the end it failed to hold my attention beyond the first 15 minutes, and I only finished it out of a sense of completeness.

For fans of the books, it is even worse. Artemis has been changed out of all recognition, from a cerebral genius to a bland action hero. Rather than discover the fairy world, it was handed to him on a plate by his father.His mother is dead.

Butler has been neutered, (including using his first name), Juliet has been turned into a 12 year old girl and hence made useless, and Holly goes from prisoner to partner in 10 minutes rather than several books. Turning Mulch into a 'Giant dwarf' is another awful change.

Overall this is a waste of time and money. I only rated it as high as a 3 because I watched it all

The Big Bang Theory (2007–2019)

A show that outstayed its welcome

[7/10 · 3 March 2020]

In the first few seasons, this was outstanding, and consistently funny. But its premise should make it a niche show at best. The well drawn characters are what made it work so well, alongside its approach towards scientists and academia.

As time went on, the original elements that mode it so funny grew stale, and rather than finish things on a high, they introduced new concepts to keep the show going. All were less funny than what they had, and the quality of the show went slowly downhill. Character traits, that were originally hysterically funny became annoying, and the show became almost a parody of itself.

The first few seasons are definitely worth watching (I rated them 9-10), after that its down to your preferences.

The Raid: Redemption (2011)

Wonderful, if limited movie.

[7/10 · 1 February 2013]

Let me say up front that part of me still thinks I am selling this movie short by rating it a 7. Some aspects of it are just that good.

To start with the good: it is one of the best martial arts/action movies I have seen in a long time. The action is fast-paced, with a raw, naturalistic feel you don't often see. There are a number of extremely well choreographed fight sequences that get the adrenalin flowing, and whatever they paid the stunt performers; it was nowhere near enough.

The plot is lean and largely there to facilitate the action, and as such does its job well without stretching credibility. Characters react realistically and at no point do you wonder 'why on earth they did that' (while truthfully knowing that the story needed them to). There are a few twists, but they are pretty predictable.

So why not an comfortable 9?

In terms of the action, I tend to cringe at the sheer amount of punishment the main characters seem to be able to shake off (but that is true of many similar films). Also, the low quality of the CGI betrays the film's limited budget.

Where the film struggles is when you try to view it as anything more than pure spectacle. The core scenario is to take a group of characters and put them into Jeopardy. Unfortunately, the film makes no attempt to get you to like or even know the characters before throwing them off the deep end. The police characters are pretty much interchangeable, and the villains for the most part faceless goons.

Once the film moves past the initial set pieces, you do begin to get to know a little about the surviving characters, but it really is not enough to draw you into their plight. What is telling, is in one of the major set pieces I suddenly realised that one of the main heroes was going to get killed. The thoughts that hit me were: first pleasant surprise that the writers would do it, followed by sadness that I just couldn't care less. The fact that there are shades of Grey between the two sides, just make it harder to have any kind of emotional connection.

I can see why the filmmakers made the decisions they did: keep the film short and get straight to the action. For me it just makes me feel the whole thing is superficial; essentially Style over substance. That said, the style is pretty spectacular and if you have any interest whatsoever in action or martial arts, you really need to watch this.

Impact (2009)

Biggest disaster the Science?

[3/10 · 26 January 2013]

To begin with, some positives: the cast did pretty well with what they were given, most of the subplots were interesting and resolved pretty well, and unlike a lot of similar movies, the emotional layers were played realistically.

So this is not irredeemable, but as with all science fiction, it lives or dies on the science.

There are three ways it can work: 1). I don't care if a movie goes for fantasy science, as long as it is upfront about it and tries to be consistent, or 2). even bad science where the science is fudged for the sake of the story, IF the story is a fun ride. Obviously 3). Good science throughout is best, but how many movies manage that?

This piece tries for option 3, with detailed scientific explanations everywhere, but almost every use of science is wrong. As other reviews show, some people can look past that. Personally the rest of the movie is not good enough to cut them that much slack and in any event I just found the constant stream of errors grate more and more as the film went on. It was almost as is the writers thought that they could just say anything and no-one would notice.

I really don't want to pick the details apart, but one example to highlight my irritation.

The basic premise is that a small piece of highly dense material hits the moon and wackiness ensues. Firstly they call it Brown Dwarf Star material, which is not super dense. The description isn't of that material, but instead of dead cold star material - a black dwarf. That is fine, except that astrophysicists don't think it actually exists yet. Instead of Black Dwarfs there are White Dwarfs, which would be OK for the plot, except you can easily see them. They might have meant Neutron Star material, except that would have been way heavier that they wanted (mass of Sun not Earth) which would wreck the rest of the plot.

Secondly, whichever option they actually meant, something that dense, that fast hitting the moon is likely to shatter it and keep on going. Funnier would be that if the fragment hit the moon and stuck as in the film its momentum (remembering that the fragment was 6-10 times heavier than the moon) would knock the moon completely out of orbit.

Lastly, the object has to be a fragment of White Dwarf/Neutron Star/whatever as a whole one is way too big for the plot to work. The only problem with that is how on earth you break a piece off of one of the densest objects in the universe.

It feels nit-picky to go through things like this, but the same is true of every part of the plot that is science-Dependant. By the time the tanker started floating, while the water nearby was unaffected, and non-metallic objects were flying around, while cars were not, I was not sure whether I should laugh or cry.