Nevele Reviews

Ender's Game (2013)

Stunning but Rushed

[7/10 · 23 December 2013]

I won't make this a long review. Ender's game was a highly enjoyable movie to watch. The surroundings, the spaceships, the planets, all is absolutely stunning and great to see. The casting and acting are well done.

The movie feels very rushed and chopped though. You're going through a great story with light speed, and none of us could shake the feeling that this movie could've done with at least half an hour more. The speed in which this story is told doesn't leave enough room to establish the characters, and certainly not to see their progress through the story.

I will eagerly await the 3,5 hour during directors cut in a year or 2, hopefully.

Angels & Demons (2009)

I wish I hadn't read the book

[5/10 · 26 July 2009]

I am sorry for all the readers, but I don't know where to begin.

Let me say at first that I'm not a big Dan Brown fan, but I read Angels & Demons with great pleasure. The book deals a lot with the eternal question of Science vs. Religion and that made me think a lot about that subject again. That big battle is totally lost in the movie.

A lot of the important lines in the book (CERN, Maximilian Kohler, the scepsis of the Swiss Guard, the love relationship between Robert and Vittoria, the Hassassin, the relationship between the Camerlengo and the pope) are lost in the movie screenplay. This makes the movie a very cut-down and over-simplified version.

Would the movie be any good if I hadn't read the book? I still doubt it. From scene 3 on, the movie is a 'chase-movie' without interruption. There is no time for contemplation or depth. No story-line, no backgrounds. It's just a chase movie in a GREAT decorum.

You would think that with a running time of about 140 minutes a movie is able to bring more. Much more.

The Hit List (1993)

Cliché after Cliché

[4/10 · 24 April 2008]

Think of a cliché, any cliché, in a movie about a professional hit men getting tangled in a web of revenge. Thought about one? It's in this movie.

The leading star Jeff Fahey plays the pro-hit-man and as you could've guessed, he's the sexy, strong silent type hit-man who hardly speaks more then 3 sentences in a conversation. ("I only kill people who deserve to die...") There are flashbacks when someone looks at a picture, there is a client falling in love with the hit-men, etc. etc. etc. The conversations in the movie are the stereotype dialogues you expect in a b-movie and the police-officers investigating the murders just seem to be working on their first case ever.

I give it a 4, for there are martial arts movies about revenge that are worse then this, but this movie comes close...