Violent Night review

There's apparently a discussion that takes place in some circles about whether or not Diehard counts as a Christmas movie. I can only assume that was the inspiration for the creators of Violent Night, which I think is best described as "Diehard, but with Santa Claus".

Just for good measure they mixed in elements of other popular christmas movies, like Home Alone and Bad Santa. I would even argue there's shades of A Christmas Carol to be found here, along with traditional Christmas messages of the importance of family, being good to each other, and taking time to remember what's important in life.

The result is, in my opinion at least, an entertaining and tongue-in-cheek action-comedy that successfully manages to balance emotional elements and heartwarming Christmas-appropriate beats with plenty of "you're-not-supposed-to-do-that-in-a-Christmas-movie" bloody violence and profanity.


I should probably mention that I'm not Christian myself, but I do appreciate the idea of Christmas and I do enjoy a good Christmas movie. It's not as sacred to me as it might be to some people, but I don't like Christmas-bashing and I don't support attempts to try to turn Christmas in to a generic holiday or anything like that.

What I'm saying is, I could appreciate the traditional Christmas elements of the film without being too bothered by the more irreverant parts. But some people might not enjoy seeing Old Saint Nicholas running around swearing and killing people (even if it's violent murderers that he's visiting violence upon). I understand and respect that, it's a violent and bloody movie that certainly isn't for everyone.

In fact I honestly didn't enjoy the initial portrayal of Santa, as a bitter joyless drunkard. But unlike the aweful character we saw in Bad Santa (who was of course just a "mall-Santa"), I feel Violent Night ultimately did a pretty good job of making old Nick feel human. He was relateable, I could understand why he was a little rough, and I absolutely rooted for him.

Which is why I now understand why David Harbour was chosen for, and accepted, the role. Initially I was expecting a character a little closer to Goldberg's in Santa's Slay, and David Harbour seemed an odd choice. But this isn't just a gag movie; it has heart, and David Harbour brings that. Ultimately I think he was a great pick and I enjoyed his performance. Well, with perhaps the small exception of a few scenes where he wasn't speaking very clearly; that might have been an attempt to make Santa feel tired and hurt, but I found it a little hard to understand exactly what he was saying. Not a big deal, just thought it was worth mentioning.

John Leguizamo was great as the antagonist, menacing and somewhat maniacal when needed. I don't see him in too many action roles, so that was fun. I thought Leah Brady did a great job as the sweet and innocent Trudy. Some of the supporting characters were reasonably grounded, but most were a little cartoonish, played for laughs. I wouldn't have objected to some of the characters being fleshed out a little more, but regardless, just about every character was fun and had some personality, and the cast did a good job all round.

I will say that I would have liked for the relationship between Jason and Gertrude to be fleshed out a little better. We are told that Gertrude was too controlling, and it ruined Jason and Alva's development and relationships, but I didn't really see it in Gertrude herself. She was cold and unlikeable, but that's all; she never seemed to me to be as terrible a person as the movie seemed to want us to believe.


I also felt the movie probably should have fleshed out Santa's story a bit more. It gave him a bit of a backstory, but I just didn't feel it was enough: you can't talk about who he was before he became Santa without bothering to give us even a tiny hint about how he became Santa. Why was he chosen, by who, where did the magic come from; the movie doesn't address any of that at all.

I guess what I'm saying is, I was invested enough to want more. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I actually feel a sequel, or better yet a prequel, that fleshes out this version of the character and his history a bit better, might be welcome. As long as it isn't just more of the same again; I actually think a movie showing him become Santa could work very well.


My only real criticism of the film is that it kind of seemed to be going back and forth a little bit early on, with what felt like a couple of false starts where Santa was kind of playing "action hero", but not quite; it took a bit too long for them to really commit to the bit, you know? But when they finally did, they pretty much went all in, so I can't complain too much.


Overall I'm giving it a 7/10. I was expecting a silly little action comedy, and was pleasantly surprised when it proved to be a little bit more than just that.

Black Adam review

While I used to read a lot of comics, including plenty of Justice League, the truth is I don't know too much about Black Adam. I guess I just didn't happen across the right titles/issues. But I what little I'd seen of the character did catch my interest. At least sometimes, he seemed to be less a villain and more of, well, someone who might have had a point, even if he did things differently from the heroes.

So when I heard that the Rock was personally invested in bringing the character to the big screen, I was intrigued. I can't say I was expecting this movie to be good, but I wanted it to be, and I even allowed myself to hope that it might be.

The film felt a little clumsy to me. It starts with a narrator giving us a big expository infodump, which just feels like a lazy way of getting vital information across. There's quite a lot of important characters, but very few of them get much actual development, especially in terms of backstory. The movie feels a little unfocussed, with a macguffin that's established as being vitally important right from the start, and yet it's constantly ignored and pushed to the background. Character motivations and reasoning often felt a little shallow and contrived. A lot of fantastical elements don't receive any explanation at all. There's plenty in this movie for people to complain about is what I'm saying.

And yet I enjoyed it. The first big action set-piece had me grinning, enjoying the music and the gratuitous dramatic slow-mo. The movie was quite action-heavy, and I thought the action was quite good overall; it made good use of special effects and had enough variety that I didn't find it repetitive. What's more I was invested; I was almost surprised to find myself caring, at least a little, about most of the characters. They might not have had much development but they did have personality. And while the central themes of the movie might not have been explored in that much depth, I dare say they did resonate with me somewhat (though I can see why some people might take issue with some of the thematic elements).

Dwayne Johnson played Black Adam as a quiet, somewhat distant, yet intense character. I wouldn't call it a very emotional performance, but I still found the character likeable and even in the end relateable, at least a little bit. I liked Pierce Brosnan's Fate, I actually think he put a lot of heart into the film. And while I didn't think Aldis Hodge's Hawkman had as much depth as a character, I liked the chemistry the two had. Sarah Shahi was good as Adrianna, though I felt the character could have been written with a bit more personality. Mohammed Amer's Karim was a sufficiently entertaining comedy side-kick, I like that he wan't portrayed as a coward but rather did not hesitate to step up when he needed to. I thought Marwan Kenzari did a good job as Ishmael, it's a shame he didn't have more screen time to really bring the character to life.

It's not Bodhi Sabongui's fault, but I kinda hated his character Amon; did we really need another cape-obsessed kid teaching the protagonist how to be a comic-book character? It kinda worked in Shazam because Shazam was basically a big kid, and that film gave them a lot of time with nothing particularly dangerous happening for them to chill. That wasn't the case here. Plus the kid was undisciplined, running around pulling stupid stunts and causing issues for everyone else, and probably should have died several times. Honestly the character is one of my biggest issues with the movie. But hey, he was nowhere near as irritating as Awkwafina's Katy in Shang-Chi, so I guess it's not that a big deal.


Overall I guess I'd call this movie a 7/10. It's a fun superhero movie that's just a little different from a lot of what we've seen in the superhero genre in the last few years.




#####SPOILER WARNING#####
Black Adam is considered an "anti-hero", and one of the major themes of the film is what a hero is. The Justice Society say he's not a hero because he kills his enemies - which makes sense in context as for a long time the Justice League (and I believe the other "official" teams including the Justice Society) has been portrayed in the comics as never taking a life. Black Adam himself doesn't call himself a hero. But his people see him as a hero; it doesn't bother them that he's actively killing their opressers. And that I think that's an interesting topic to debate.

Of course this movie doesn't delve into the debate, not in depth anyway, but it was still interesting to see it touched upon at least. And as I said I can see why some people would not be happy with the idea of a killer like Black Adam being ultimately portrayed as a hero in this film, but let's be real: movie protagonists killing the bad guys is a pretty common thing. So I don't have a problem with it here, if though I don't exactly want to see Superman flying around murdering people. Different comic book characters represent different themes.

Having said that, I didn't get what was up with the Justice Society. Since when do they work for Waller? They got so upset with Black Adam for killing people who they must have known were criminials, or at the very least soldiers who attacked him first, yet they were perfectly happy to hand him over to be locked in a tiny tube for his entire (possibly eternal) life? How is that BETTER than dying? Never mind that they crossed international borders without legal authority and send him to be incarcerated without even a trial. Seems pretty hypocritical to me for them to be criticising his methods.


I'm not sure if eternium is even a thing in the comics, I don't recall ever having heard of it. But the setup of this movie, with eternium only being found in Khandaq, feels a bit too similar to Black Panther's whole "vibranium is only found in Wakanda" deal, with the respective characters being champions (and in the comics rulers) of their respective countries. Of course that was just the setup, the plot developed in a very different way, with a foreign power occupying the country for it's resources etc. I'm just saying there were a couple of things that were very reminiscent of other recent superhero films. Like the giant CGI skybeam, and the sudden Suicide-Squad-esque army of undead that came out of nowhere at the end. Oh, and Atom Smasher growing to giant size using a suit given to him by his older predessor has Ant-Man vibes. It's fine, just, you know, a bit lazy perhaps.


They really did NOT explain the Justice Society AT ALL. They just showed up and acted like they'd been around the whole time. Honestly, I respect it. It honestly makes the world feel more realistic to me, to think that superheroes have been around for ages and don't even need to be explained, than to think that the world is suddenly full of superheroes when there weren't any around before. It just feels like the film makers finally accept that superheroes aren't some crazy idea that "normal" film audiences won't be able to understand unless it's all spelled out for us. Superheores are mainstream now, for better or worse.


I feel like the eventual revelation that Teth Adam wasn't the one chosen to wield the powers was a very powerful moment. It not only explained a lot, it also gave him a lot more depth. Suddenly we understood why he was so distant, so surly. Why he tolerated Amon and eventually even went along with his folly, why he looked out for Adrianna even as he was busy fighting off an attack from soldiers armed with weapons he had never seen before.


The way he floated around everywhere is actually fitting with how I've seen him portrayed in the comics, yet I feel like they gave it slightly different meaning here. It's interesting.


So there's Superman and Wonder Woman comics in the world where Superman and Wonder Woman are real? How does that work exactly? What I'm asking is, who pockets the profits? Pfft, the publisher is probably a subsidiary of Wayne Enterprises.


How exactly did Samir die? Did Ishmael kill him, then drag his body out of a different (higher) door than the one they came in from, and throw his body over the cliff? I'm really not sure what that was all about.

It feels like Waller just keeps failing upwards, doesn't it? I wonder where this is going to go in the end? Is she just going to always be this boogeyman in the background, or is there going to be an eventual showdown, are we eventually going to get to see her fall?

Free Guy review

When I saw the first trailer I don't think I even finished it; I was immediately on board and didn't want anything more spoiled. This was a movie I was looking forwards to for a while. Then when I was watching a different movie in the cinema the other day a newer trailer for Free Guy came on. I closed my eyes and blocked my ears but still heard some of the dialogue. And I didn't like what I heard. So when I finally got to see Free Guy, I was... apprehensive.

Still, I was surprised by how annoyed I got with the movie by the end. If I had been in the cinema alone there's a chance I might have walked out before it was over. Now a big part of that is that I'm familiar with programming and I've worked in games development, so whenever they tried to get technical (or would that be "pseudo-technical"?), the sheer stupidity of what they were saying completely broke my immersion. Unfortunately that happened quite a lot. I honestly believe the why and hows could have been handled a whole lot better - not that I think they were actually needed at all - and the whole thing could have been made a whole lot more believable. Or at least easier to suspend disbelief for.

But it wasn't just the technical aspects that felt badly written to me, pretty much the whole plot doesn't hold up in my mind. Basically, characters are just constantly doing things for really bad or practically non-existent reasons. Sometimes characters or themes felt contradictory to me. The whole script just didn't feel well thought-out.

I appreciate the fact that this movie isn't a sequel or, to my knowledge at least, based on a book or comic or something. But that doesn't exactly mean that it's original; the core concept has been explored in movies before, never-mind books and comics. I was personally reminded of Wreck-it-Ralph and The Lego Movie; the three all have similarities and differences, but they are all centered around the concept of a "real" world and a "fictional" one. Where Free Guy really lost me was in it's nonsensical attempts to justify the fictional world. In contrast Wreck-It-Ralph for example explained the rules of how its digital world worked and faithfully operated within those rules, but never tried to give an explanation for the existence of that world in the first place - and it didn't suffer in the slightest for it.

Another thing that just rubbed me the wrong way is that the movie seems on the surface to be targeted at gamers, yet upon watching I was struck by how little it seems to think of them. The movie is about a fictional game called "Free City", which seems to me to be mostly inspired by Grand Theft Auto. The protagonists of the film don't seem to play the game for fun, but simply because they have to, and other than them we we only really see three people playing it: two young girls (I think it's supposed to be funny that these young girls are playing such a violent "morally bankrupt" game), and one ugly overweight dude who's framed as being weird and unpleasant; he lives with his mother and yells at her not to touch his "special sock".

So the only real gamers we see are not normal well-adjusted respectable adults. And the only two games we see are Free City - basically a crime simulator, as the only missions we see people doing are robbing and hurting normal civilans - and the "good" game where you don't actually play the game, you just watch the game's AI or something. Which arguably doesn't really fit the normal definition of a "game". I definitely got the sense that the writers don't actually play games or even know that much about them; is their knowledge about gaming entirely from those old fear-mongering news reports? The film seemed to be condemning games as violent and lacking in morals, but there's just so much more to gaming than this movie seems to be aware of. There's all sorts of games out there, and while many of them involve violence, very few of them ask you to rob a bank. Hell, the movie shows everyone making a big deal out of Guy helping innocent civilian NPCs like it's never been done before, apparently not realising that's exactly what most games are all about. This movie just does not think much of games or gamers.

I like Ryan Reynolds, and this movie felt like it was written for him: his character really does lean into the kind of comedic performance we've seen from Ryan in movies like The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard. Which was fine with me. Taika Waititi was also fun, although I felt he was just too shallow a villain and would have worked much better if he was given a little more depth; he is portrayed as literally being incapable of comprehending the very idea of the existence of anything important other than money - that's genuinely not an exaggeration. If Keys was supposed to be boring and not particularly characterful, then Joe Keery did an adequate job - I'm not really being snide here, I genuinely don't think Keys was supposed to be interesting. Or at least it didn't occur to the writers to try to make him interesting - but then when does Hollywood ever try to make "computer nerds" interesting? Lil Rel Howery didn't quite land for me as Buddy; at least not later when he was acting less like a person and more like a chihuahua. Jodie Comer just felt completely miscast as Millie, at least in the in-game scenes. She looked awkward in the action scenes, a lot of the romantic scenes with Guy just did not work at all for me (and it wasn't Ryan who wasn't working), and overall she just didn't feel like the character that the movie initially tried to portray her as. In face I felt she was kind of awful as Molotov. I actually wonder if that's deliberate, like the whole character is supposed to be very fake? It would make sense and is supported by the whole fake accent thing, but the movie is so badly written as a whole that I have a hard time believing it. Well, even if it was deliberate, I still hated it. She was not as bad in the real-world scenes, but the poor writing didn't exactly allow her to shine there either.


It's really hard for me to be objective about this film. I didn't enjoy it, but overall the action was good (when it wasn't centered around Jodie Comer, which luckily most of it wasn't) and the comedy worked for me (though it relied on a certain degree of familiarity with computer games so it might not have that broad an appeal), so... you know, it's certainly a movie that you could enjoy if you have a high tolerance for very stupid writing. I'm going to compromise by giving it a 6/10: what I would consider not particularly bad but not particularly good. But subjectively I think it's bad. Very bad.




#####SPOILER WARNING#####
I would like to elaborate slightly on why I think this movie doesn't respect games or gamers. I mentioned that it never shows people (or at least adults) who actually play games for fun in a good light, pretty much always showing them as annoying weirdos. But more than that, it has these apparently famous streamers (I mean, I've heard of them but I've never watched them) talking about what a revolutionary idea it is to not run around gunning down innocent civilians in games. Like, they've never even thought of that before. Seriously, when Guy acts as a hero, the whole world acts like this is something that has never been done before! Which is amazingly stupid and ignorant: games are ALL ABOUT heroes. Probably 99% of games have you playing as a hero (at least on paper). And even the ones where you play as an anti-hero often focus more on presenting you with an even greater evil to fight (like some of the Saints Row games), so even if the game offers you the freedom to be "bad" your main goal is still not just being bad, but actually fighting against someone worse. Games where you genuinely just play a crook certainly do exist, but they are a small minority.

What's more there are games that are far deeper and more thought provoking than this movie could even think to aspire to be; games that explore the concept of morality in a way that movies can't. Games that force you to make difficult decisions, or to watch the character you're controlling get morally corrupted and become a villain as a consequence of the very actions you were guiding them through. Games that let you play both sides of a conflict, showing how easy it is for either side of an argument to believe they are in the right.

And then of course there's games that aren't violent at all. According to Wikipedia as of writing the biggest selling game ever is Minecraft - a game about building stuff. OK, GTA is number 2, but number 3 is Tetris: a puzzle game about stacking bricks! The writers of this film know nothing about games, and yet have the audacity to try to preach that games are wrong and they... I dunno, shouldn't be about playing but only about watching? Or something? I mean, as far as I can tell that's what you're supposed to do with their "good game"!

By the way, the idea of a "game" that has AI that actually thinks and feels is incredibly disturbing to me, far more so than the idea of a game where the player commits "crimes" on unthinking unfeeling NPCs. But I guess that's another topic, one that's perilously close to trying to discuss the meaning of life, and I am not ready to get into that.


What's probably a bigger issue if I am to be honest is how poorly the characters are written. Let's start with a simple one: Keys. He used to be an indie game developer, and he had a crush on his partner Millie. Then when the game that he put so much time, effort and passion into is buried, Millie decides they've been wronged and quits in order to try to get their game back. But instead of following the woman he cares about to try to recover his creation, he... doesn't, even though apparently that means he's not supposed to talk to her anymore because of his NDA. What's worse, he's not even working on actual development - something that indie game developers enjoy, or else they wouldn't have become indie developers - despite the fact that his boss has repeatedly offered him the chance. Instead he just sits around fixing bugs and doing customer support - both things that are generally not considered to be very enjoyable. Why? Why didn't he quit with Millie, or at least take the development job? It doesn't make sense. He just waves off an offer of promotion with a nonsensical "I'm good where I am". That's insane and also stupid.

I also don't understand why Key told Antwan that Guy was an NPC. Why would he do that - surely he knows that Antwan wouldn't care about that! He already knows that Antwan isn't interested in the creative elements of game design and that Antwan does not like Guy (thinking he's a player) and wants him out of the game - he's already working on a replacement - and that Guy being an NPC is proof of Antwan breaking the law, so Antwan would need to hide that proof or lose out big-time (or so we're told). So just announcing it to Antwan was incredibly stupid. And why the hell didn't he take backups of Guy, and the whole game in fact? He's a software developer: we back up our work regularly! I mean, we pretty much all learn to after the first couple of times we lose a big chunk of work... but in this case you don't need to be a software developer to think "Oh damn, I need to make a backup of this!".

Antwan doesn't make much sense either. Yes, he's a very shallow cartoon villain, but even then not much of what he does makes very much sense. He buys this little indie game, and then doesn't publish it. Why did he buy it? For the advanced learning AI? He doesn't WANT advanced learning AI! The moment he finds out that the game's A.I. is behaving in a novel way, he immediately has it reset! Perhaps the movie wanted to imply that the game was very popular because of it's advanced AI, but we never see that - the NPCs never act in an intelligent way when interacting with the players. In fact Millie actually makes fun of the game for how the NPCs always repeat the exact same lines, suggesting that the AI behaviour is very rigid and mechanical. There's just never any indication that any part of Keys and Millie's original game was somehow important to Free City.

At one point, when Keys suggests making an original game, Antwan shuts that idea down because he thinks people only want sequels - this is one of the things that's supposed to mark him as a jerk because only making sequels instead of original creations is something that a lot of people (myself included) look down on; it's "money-grubbing executive behaviour". But then later when it turns out he's not using any of the original code and is creating the sequel from scratch, that's also shown as "evil" behaviour! Developing any game, even a sequel, from scratch is far more expensive than simply tweaking your existing codebase slightly, and is really only worth doing if the existing code is unusable moving forwards for technical reasons (which is obviously not the case here), or you have a very ambitious game in mind that requires completely different architecture in your gaming engine. Which is a good thing, and is the exact opposite of the "lazy sequel" idea that the movie condemned him for earlier! So why is he doing it if he only cares about money and think that players aren't really interested in new stuff, and why is the movie condemning him for it? He's just such a poorly written villain, nothing but a shallow collection of barely-related clichés.

When the movie starts we see Guy walking around, feeling super-casual about all the death and destruction that surrounds him. His bank gets robbed at gunpoint every day and it's just routine for him, he has casual conversations with other NPCs as they are getting beaten up and robbed, there's literally wars being fought all around him as he goes about his day and it's completely normal for him. He even gets killed by a train and wakes up the next morning like nothing has happened - and we know he remembers it because he refers to it later as the "train of death" or something. This all happens right from the start of the movie. We are shown time and time again that death just doesn't really exist in his world. So why is it that he goes into denial when he shoots the player robbing the bank the first time? And why is he so scared when the cops start shooting at him, when he died just the other day and treated it like nothing? And again when his memory is erased and Molotov takes him hostage he's acting terrified; it doesn't make sense when his bank gets robbed at gunpoint every damned day that he would be so terrified when a gun is pointed at him. It's hugely inconsistent.

By the way, Guy changed his whole life for Millie, utterly devoting himself to leveling up just so he could spend time with her. But at the end when he breaks up with her it just seems so easy, so casual. Yes, he grew and changed as a character, but for a romance that was built up so much up to just a few minutes earlier, with the movie hitting all the romantic clichés (love brought back Guy's memory, Millie did the impossible for love, etc), it just ended too easily. No-one seemed particularly sad about having to give up on what was just a few moments ago portrayed as a very powerful and intense romance.

And now we have to talk about Millie. In the real world, Millie was kind of obnoxious. She broke into Keys' home to speak to him. Apart from being illegal, that's just NOT right: it's not OK to break into people's homes. There's other ways to speak to people. She could have waited outside at the very least. What's more, she's not there to catch up with an old friend; she's just there berate him, to push him to give up on his career and pretty much break the law to help her get what she wants. She really doesn't seem to respect or care about him, only about what she can get him to do for her.

But she's far worse in the game. The movie initially sets her up as this tough femme-fatale, probably because they thought that the scenes of her acting that way would be fun and cool? Which is fine, except that she's not really very capable or influential for the rest of the movie - she keeps failing early on and then kind of just sits and watches other people do most of the work in the later parts of the movie. So showing her acting super-tough doesn't really establish her character because that's not who she really is. OK, she's agressive and driven, but still: she's not the one solving most of the problems, Guy is. She's not exactly a damsel in distress, but... she's the one who needs something and all the men have to work hard and make sacrifices to help her. For much of the movie anyway.

To be fair, by the end they are ostensibly trying to save Guy and the rest of the AI from deletion. But surely if that was their goal they could just back up their code - Keys even had Guy's code on screen at one point. I mean, just back up the whole game. No, they spend the whole movie trying to achieve what Millie wanted from the start: finding proof that Free City was built on her game. So... yeah, she kind of does fill the narrative role of "the girl who needs help" and Guy and Keys are "the men who help her".

But that's not really the issue with her "femme fatale" intro. The issue is that she acts like a real jerk. She's buying info from a broker, but she's really rude and hostile towards him, going as far as downright violence. She says she kills people who ask questions. Then she kills him because he asked her about her accent (which was fake btw). Killing people for talking is what villains do! In fact it's a cinematic shorthand to let the audience know that someone IS a villain! She's supposed to be one of the heroes of the movie, but her introduction is telling us that she's a villain! That's incredibly bad writing! Seriously, this is writing 101 stuff: introduce your main characters in a way that tells us who they are! OK, that's an oversimplification, but still: unless the whole point is to fake the audience out (which it wasn't here), introducing a hero in a way that tells the audience that they're a villain is just very bad writing!

Of course she's not actually killing anyone: it's all a game, they'll just respawn. So why does she kill other players? The only possible explanation is that she enjoys it (which is at odds with the "moral" of the movie btw). To me it felt like a jerk move. In fact she acts like a jerk a lot while in Free City, and occasionally when in the real world too (such as the afore-mentioned breaking-into-Keys'-home thing). I suppose there's an argument to be made that Millie is deliberately written as a jerk at the start, and that later in the movie she becomes a more likeable character, as part of a character growth arc. It really didn't feel that way to me though; it felt initially like the movie was trying to portray her as a "hot badass chick", and the only reason she stopped being an obvious jerk to people later was because she was too busy. After all, she doesn't really do anything nice for anyone else, well, ever, and her goal in the movie never changes in a way that might indicate that she's grown and changed: she basically starts off trying to prove that Antwan stole her game, and... then she manages to get her game back. Yes she gets more than that, but it's in addition to what she wanted from the start. I just don't see any indication that she actually changed.

Going back to killing the information broker, doing so despite that fact that it's a game and he'll just respawn didn't just set her up as an unpleasant person, it also establishes her as an idiot. Because what if she ends up needing more information, and he refuses to help her because now he doesn't like her? Or worse, he might decide to screw with her as revenge, like warning the dude she wanted to steal the video from about her. There was just no reason for her to go around creating enemies!

Speaking of, why the hell was she trying to break in and steal that videoclip anyway? Did she maybe consider just asking him for it? He's really got no reason to say no, especially if she asks him nicely. I mean, worst comes to worst she could just offer him some money or something! And that's completely ignoring the fact that the dude apparently was a streamer or something, meaning the video clip was probably already up online somewhere. I mean, the guy said that it was a weird bug and he even went back and tried to replicate it later; that's the kind of video clip that people tend to share online these days. Because that's what gamers do these days: upload clips of interesting things that happen to them, not lock the clips up in some sort of digital vault to stop anyone from seeing them! Which the writers should know if they, you know, had any idea at all about gaming.

But instead of doing anything the slightest bit intelligent (like maybe using the portal gun as soon as she got the clip or hiring some NPCs to help her fight his NPC bodyguards or something), she spends ages doing things in the stupidest way possible, because otherwise the plot wouldn't have happened. You know what I call that? Bad writing. Because now I'm not invested in the plot, and I don't like the character. I mean, overall I just found her to be unlikeable. And when a movie's leads are unlikeable, well, that's a problem, because it means I'm not enjoying myself while watching them.

It didn't help that Millie didn't seem to like gamers. She treats the players of Free City with disdain, effectively referring to them as "sociopathic man-children", treating Guy himself with an incredible degree of disdain and condescention when she initially thinks he's just a player. She doesn't seem to think much of Free City itself; she didn't show any enjoyment of the game (other than killing other players), and seemed dismissive of it when telling Guy how to level up (so I'm not sure how she got to be such a high level or how she collected so much stuff in-game; she had to have played a lot of missions to aquire experience and items, which is just not consistent with the character or the messsage of the movie). We see her belittling it for the NPCs' repeated voice lines, for example. She never talks about any games except her own AI sim thing (but then the whole movie doesn't really); I just never got the impression that she was a gamer or cared about games. She never talks about any other games for example. Which is why it feels weird to me that she was a game developer. Most game developers I've met - at least the younger ones - like games. That's why they got into the business.

She does end up liking Guy though. You know, eventually. In fact she falls in love with him. Which is fine. What's not fine is what happens after they break up at the end. So it turns out that Keys was into her the whole time and she didn't know. And as soon as someone explains it to her, she runs right into his waiting arms (metaphorically speaking). This happens probably less than five minutes - in movie time - after the break-up with Guy. That's got to be the fastest rebound ever right? Like, that can't be healthy right? Even if Guy's character was partly influenced by Keys (which isn't really what the movie claimed but which we can assume is probably the case), they are still different people with different personalities. Besides, Millie has been working alongside Keys for years prior to this. Just the two of them, collaborating on their shared passion project. And the whole time she didn't notice he was interested in her? Fine, maybe he's really good at hiding it. But surely in this time she has at least considered him as a potential romantic interest? She must have; that's kind of how humans work. And clearly she rejected the idea, as if she had ever decided to persue it I'm sure Keys wasn't going to turn her down. So basically, for years she's been sitting beside him and not had any romantic inclinations towards him; that means he's not interesting to her. But the moment she finds out he likes her she's instantly into him? No hesitation? That's just.. ugh, it's just lazy writing!

Sigh. So she's a protagonist who's introduced like an antagonist, killing for no reason. A game developer who doesn't like games. She co-wrote the most advanced AI in history and yet is clearly an idiot. And she was so deeply in love with Guy that she somehow overwrote software with her mind so she could kiss him, but drops him and moves on in under five minutes without shedding a tear. It's almost impressive how badly written she is. Well, all the characters in this movie are badly written to some degree or other, as was the plot. It's like the writers just did not care about the fundamentals of storytelling!


I hated the "famous streamers" bits. I think it's because the whole idea of a streamer is someone who says whatever they are thinking without a script or as much in the way of filters. So when you take a bunch of streamers and have them reading from a script someone else wrote for them, it completely undermines the whole concept. And yeah, I get that it's a movie about gaming and streamers are a part of gaming culture, so it was always going to be that way, but somehow seeing them vocalize the stupid preachy "message" of the movie like it was some mind-blowing new idea just pushed it too far for me.


What the hell was up with those scenes that suddenly popped up at the end where the whole world was watching what was happening in the game? I mean that's a common cliche in movies, but it really didn't work here. In The Truman Show it's very well set up right from the start that the show is popular all around the world. But here we're only told that Free City is a popular game; as in, popular to play. There's no mention of it being broadcast on live television. Those were not twitch streams we were shown, that was just plain old television. We're never told that the game has an e-sport scene or anything. But late in the movie we just suddenly see old Chinese dudes in a tiny noodle joint watching this multiplayer crime simulator game on the only TV like it's a news broadcast or something. It's just so weird and out-of-place.


There's a scene where Guy and Buddy talk about whether something matters if it's not real, or something. And then that's it, no-one cares about the fact that they're just a computer simulation anymore. To me it felt far too easy, that they had this brief, rather shallow discussion and just casually overcome the existential horror of not being real. I just think that, like so many other things in this the movie, it would have been better to not bother including it at all, than to do it in such mediocre way. I dunno, that scene just annoyed me is all.


So the writers think that part of a building is one server and another part is on another server? That AI characters are only on the server that correlates to which part of the building they're on, and they move around between servers as they move between areas in the city? That if you wreck servers that parts of the game disappear, but the actual simulation keeps running? Oh, a somehow all the NPCs end up in the only part of the city that's on a server that WASN'T destroyed, despite having no way of knowing which server/part of the city was going to be destroyed next? And both that one building in the distance AND the bridge with Guy on it AND the "original game world" that Guy is looking for are all on the exact same server? I just... sigh. I just can't suspend my disbelief for this movie, it's just too stupid.


How did Keys NOT recognize his own code? That's a bit like an artist not recognizing their own paintings because someone changed the frame. I don't buy it. I mean, at one point he talks about how he programmed Guy (mentioning using Millie as inspiration when designing Guy's dream girl or something), and yet he somehow doesn't recognise that he's working with the AI system that he wrote from the ground up? That's INSANE.

Why are the old game assets even in the new game? It's not like someone forgot about them; we're told Antwan tried to hide them, even patching out bugs caused by their presence. Why do that instead of just deleting the damned assets? It's not hard! I'm pretty sure it's easier than hiding them and patching bugs!

And since I'm discussing technical-ish stuff, how did no-one know that Antwan was developing the new game from scratch? That's not something you can do in secret from your own damned company! I dunno, whatever.

So what was the deal with Millie's lawsuit against Antwan? She was suing him for using the code he bought from them? I mean, he bought it, it's his. The case makes no sense. It also makes no sense that the original world is still inside the game. That's dumb, there's no reason for that. It's even brought up that Antwan realised the old game world was baked into the reflection maps and so he fixed that; why wouldn't he just delete all the old game world assets while he was at it? There's no technical reason not to, it wouldn't take that much work. He was after all VERY aware of the lawsuit Millie had against him. Besides, I just don't see any reason why he would build Free City on their game in the first place. As I said, there's no indication that any aspect of their original game was needed or desired for Free City.


Anyone who has played videogames in the last thirty years or so has almost certainly encountered an invisible wall before. Invisible walls in videogames are exactly that: walls that you can't see and can't move through. The "invisible wall" in Free Guy that they need to pass to get to the "original game" is invisible (until to get close to it), but IS NOT A WALL: when Guy tries to touch the "wall" he isn't stopped, but his hand passes right through! It was much more like one of those optic illusion walls that hides an entrance (like the one in the old Jem and the Holograms cartoon). I was fully expecting Guy to poke his head through and see something different on the other side! Just... the guys who made this movie are clearly not gamers!

By the way, they say that they need to do something about the wall to get to the old game, but we never see the wall go away. There's never any specific mention of it being deactivated or anything. Instead they walk up to the water and we see Keys make them a bridge from a building. There's no visual of the wall being there initially and then suddenly not being there; they act more like the water is the problem! But it's a game with planes and helicopters in it (we've seen them): why do something overly-complex like reconfiguring a building into a walkway (which btw would probably take weeks of development time) instead of just spawning them a flying vehicle? Hell, why doesn't Millie already have one: she has a room full of cars and stuff after all, and even if she didn't have one she could probably buy one from the in-game store in like thirty seconds or something!

Of course the whole ending was a mess. Guy and Millie need to get across to the other side of the city, but they're afraid Antwan will get all the NPCs to stop them. So they... somehow gather all the NPCs in the city - which would take at least as much time as it would have taken them to get to the beach, and in practice would definitely take much more - to give them a big speach and hope that everyone believes the whole "you're living in a videogame" thing, processes such soul-crushing news in just a few seconds, and agrees to help them. Then we see everyone in the city back where they were before, and after they've clearly been sitting there for a while (they are holding cups of hot coffee, so they've spent at least a few minutes brewing coffee or something), we see Guy and Millie driving past in a car!

Honestly, what the hell is that sequence of events? How did Guy and Millie summon everyone in the city? How long did they stand around waiting for them? And then did the two wait for them all to leave before they started driving? And what exactly was the point - how exactly was Antwan going to get everyone to try to stop Guy and Millie? There was never any indication that the NPCs could be told to do stuff directly (it's mentioned that players can hire NPCs as guards, but that's not the same as Antwan just telling everyone in the city to do something). Oh, and btw: Millie has a portal gun. I feel like that could have been useful to quickly move across the city?


Antwan develops Dude to replace Guy. Why would he develop an AI to "replace" what he thought was a player? It doesn't really make sense to me as a thing that someone would think of unless they already knew that Guy was an AI. But Antwan didn't know that.


Visually the movie was a little boring? It was clean and bright, but it was just a city. You know, one of the great things about games is that they can take you to amazing places, far off worlds. Ditto for movies. So the fact that it all just happened in what was actually quite a small-feeling city was a bit of a waste. They could have made it more interesting; there's no reason Free City couldn't have been a futuristic sci-fi city or something. Except that apparently the only game the writers know of is GTA and couldn't be bothered to try to hide it in the slightest.


Iirc Keys mentions that Guy's AI has far more lines of code than it should. The developer part of me was horrified by the idea of code in a real-time application that constantly and permanently increases in size as the product runs. That's TERRIBLE, especially for performance-oriented applications like gaming. Although having said that, the amount of unneccessary processing this game does, simulating hundereds of characters as if they were real people, but with them never actually doing anything different so the simulation makes no difference to players, is just terrible from a performance perspective.


Why does Antwan get angry that players aren't killing NPCs anymore? As far as I can tell they're still playing the game.


I hated the scene where Millie kissed Guy. Are you telling me that she somehow changed the code itself using the "the power of Love"? For real? Like, it just does not fit the entire rest of the movie! Plus she breaks up with him the next day and instantly moves on to another guy, so... I dunno, what kind of "love" was that?


When Guy and Buddy are running across the bridge and it's collapsing around them, Buddy gets cut off. So he calls to Guy, and Guy turns around - and Buddy immediately says "No! Keep going!". So why did he call out to Guy in the first place? And of course everything stops collapsing for about twenty minutes as they have a big emotional goodbye conversation. I mean, I get it from a writing perspective, but the way it played out in the movie just annoyed me because it was so stupid. Oh, and by the way, in that conversation Buddy is like "I've been scared my whole damned life, but I'm not scared anymore". Which is great, except that no, he wasn't scared, he wasn't the slightest bit scared when we saw him before, having casual conversations when while armed gunment robbed his bank. What a half-baked character.


Why was everyone behaving with such hostility when Guy asked for a different cup of coffee? A tank rolls up behind him and turns to point its cannon at him: why? It's not like there was some sort of conspiracy to keep the AI from realising the world wasn't real or anything like that. Just another scene that doesn't actually make sense.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City review

I've never played the Resident Evil games. I have watched friends play them though, and watched online reviews and playthroughs, so I do know a little about the games and characters. Enough at least to understand why fans of the games could easily hate this movie: the characters in this movie do not look or act anything like the characters in the games. Sure, they got the clothes right, but appearances and personalities just do not match what I have seen from the games.

Now it's always going to be hard to find actors who are perfect matches for videogame characters. And I expect the creators of the film clearly wanted to add a bit more racial diversity to the cast; the original games are Japanese takes on old American horror movies, and are themselves quite old to boot, so it's not surprising that the characters are predominantly caucasian, and I understand why there would be a desire to change that slightly for the film. I appreciate diverse casts, but I'm not a fan of race-swapping existing characters, so I'm pretty much on the fence on this issue - at least in this instance.

What I will say is that, because I don't have a strong attachment to the games myself, it didn't bother me too much that the characters were not translated from the games very faithfully. What bothered me more was that none of the characters were very interesting or likeable, or really had all that much chance to exhibit very much personality.

Well, it would have bothered me if I had gone in actually expecting, or even just hoping for, a good movie. But I didn't, not really. I watched this in the cinema just because I was tired of big-budget creatively-lacking sequels/reboots/remakes and other nostalgia cash-grabs that took themselves too seriously; the idea of a relatively low-budget creatively-lacking sequel/reboot/remake nostalgia cash-grab legitimately felt like a breath of fresh air. A mediocre zombie-flick that I had very little emotional investment in but that would probably have decent action and effects sounded preferable to yet another "cinematic universe" superhero movie. I'm not saying that kind of thing is bad or anything, I'm a just a little tired of them and want some low-investment stand-alone popcorn flicks.

I appologise for rambling on. The point I'm trying to make is that I went in to this movie expecting a generic zombie flick, and that's pretty much what I got. And, as far as I could tell at least, it isn't one of those zombie movies that explores the human condition, or serves as a metaphor for something, or tries a creative new twist on the genre, or is full of self-aware tongue-in-cheek humor; it's a pretty basic zombie flick. But it is a reasonably fun one. Well, I enjoyed it at least.

It helped that I rather like so many of the cast members. I really quite like Neal McDonough, and I think he did a great job through most of Racoon City - though I felt the writing let him down in the last few scenes. For most of the run-time though he was probably my favourite character. I remember being pleasantly surprised by Donal Logue in Life, I was enjoying him in this one and wish he had a little more screen-time. Hannah John-Kamen was a lot of fun in Killjoys, it's a real shame she had so little to do here. Kaya Scodelario was a little "one-note" in the previous couple of movies I'd seen her in, and that didn't change in this one. Still, I liked her in Crawl and I felt her character here was probably closer to the game version than any of the others, so I guess that "one note" was arguably the correct one. I wasn't really familiar with anyone else in the cast, and while they all did decent jobs, the only one who really left any sort of an impression was probably Tom Hopper; despite this movie's version of Wesker having ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in common with the game version, he was at least given the opportunity to display a little bit of emotional range.

To be fair the film had it's moments. I thought it did a pretty good job of establishing the atmosphere and building up to the zombie infection. It brought a bit of creativity to the action scenes, switching up the pace and style from one to the next, so I never thought it felt repetitive or started to drag on. A couple of scenes got some pretty good laughs out of me too. Even if the film wasn't very true to the games, it was still more-or-less built on them, using places, names, and plot devices from the original series. It even had a couple of secret doors that had to be opened in silly ways - an absolute cornerstone of the games.


I'll give it a 6/10. It's serviceable for casual viewing, as long as you're not precious about the games. If you are - which I can appreciate as that's how I feel about a lot of things - then yeah, you might be better off trying to forget this one exists.




#####SPOILER WARNING##### The scene with the zombie on fire was the absolute highlight for me, and worth the price of admission on it's own. Like, I've never seen someone so on fire, walking in such a relaxed and casual way - the dude was not in a hurry! And the police chief's reaction to seeing a guy on fire? Shoot him in the head! It totally cracked me up. Bear in mind this is the very start of the zombie infection, these characters have not seen a zombie yet; as far as they know it's just a dude on fire! You'd expect them to run for an extinguisher, but no! HEADSHOT! OK, to be fair it's possible that the police chief knew about the zombies as he does seem to know more than everyone else about the town, but we don't exactly know that at the time (and even later it's a little ambiguous), so it's pretty unexpcted when it happens.

The Suicide Squad review

I enjoyed the original Suicide Squad. In retrospect I was probably too generous in my review, but what I wrote reflects my feeling at the time. It's true that it has a lot of issues, but somehow those issues didn't stop me from enjoying the movie. With the news that James Gunn was attached to this one, I think everyone expected it to be much better than the first. Having just watched The Suicide Squad in the cinema, my opinion is that it is objectively better than it's predecessor.

Well, perhaps "objectively" is a stretch, but to me this one really felt far more stylish and creative than the original. Visually it was brighter and more colourful, but at the same time the humor felt darker - a juxtaposition that I think worked very well. It re-used many of the same beats as the first, but often did them better. The story felt less muddled, the protagonists more sympathetic.

So perhaps it's just my imagination that it felt like something was missing? I don't know what it is, but I just didn't feel as invested as I expected to. I don't want anyone to read too much into that because the truth is that I was in a funk the last couple of days so I wasn't in the best mindset when I walked into the cinema. But if these reviews have a purpose at all, it is to allow me to put down my thoughts and feelings, and this was one of them.

Anyway. The movie has some great visual moments, the story worked, the action was good, there wasn't a weak performance to be seen, and the humor pretty much all landed for me. Interestingly the more I think about the movie the more I appreciate some of the small details. This might be one to watch again sooner rather than later.


Overall I think I'm going to err on the side of generosity and give it an 8/10. If nothing else it's nice to watch a different type of superhero movie that, unlike all the "deconstructions of the genre" that you see running around these days, doesn't look down on the idea of superheroes.




#####SPOILER WARNING#####
After watching the movie I realised... do you see the star in the background of the poster? The poster is a spoiler! THE POSTER IS A SPOILER!


I didn't want to bog down the review talking about this, but I am curious about what it was that I felt was missing - assuming there was a legitimate reason for me to feel that. I wonder if I just wasn't feeling too invested was because the characters didn't get fleshed out very much until rather late in the movie? Or maybe it was because so many characters died at the start? That initial fakeout with everyone dying might have made me unconciously wary to let myself care about the characters as I now had the sense they might be disposeable? I don't know.

I guess it made sense for such a dark movie, but I did feel like there was just too much death. Squad members, soldiers, antagonists, civilians, freedom fighters; people died, and died easily, with little consquence or fanfare. Life felt cheap. Again, maybe that was a factor? Maybe it's hard to care much about what happens in a movie that's so nihilistic at times? I especially have a hard time with the scene where the Squad kills all those freedom fighters. Yes, it was stylish and funny and I enjoyed it, but also it bothers me. It feels so avoidable; they were obviously not soldiers (well, obvious to us, perhaps less so to the Squad as they hadn't really encountered the army at this point?), couldn't the Squad have scouted a bit more before starting to kill people? Maybe sent in some rats or something? This is not a plot-hole or anything, I'm not saying it would have made more sense, only that it's something I might have preferred. Because the knowledge that our protagonists killed a bunch of good people makes it harder for me to care about them.

The funny thing is that they then did make a big deal out of some deaths - or at least tried to. Somehow it actually worked sometimes; specifically with Milton. I liked that he actually stuck with the Squad for a while despite being someone who was just kind of there in the background. He was just a regular guy, not even a soldier really, but he was there breaking into military installations and planting explosives right next to them, just always in the background. And then the film went and actually tried to give his death some weight; while some of the other characters could just shrug and move on, not all of them could. He mattered, at least a little bit. I appreciated that. It almost seemed needed; after all the deaths, the bodies left behind with barely it word, it seemed like we needed to take a moment to stop and say "Look, death is not a trivial thing. Life matters.".


I like Idris Elba, but for some reason I didn't really like him in this movie. It took me a while to come up with a theory as to why, but I think the problem is that he plays Bloodsport as a normal human, whereas practically every other character in the movie is being played as, well, an over-the-top caricature. He's supposed to center the movie, but instead he kind of disappears. And I think that might have affected the whole movie, robbing it of some of it's impact. Or maybe not, I dunno, I'm really just guessing here.

John Cena was a lot of fun, but he also brought a subtle weight to some of his more emotional moments that actually surprised me. When he turns at the end, it feels like a mask he's been wearing to hide from his teammates has cracked and underneath is a real human who feels genuine regret, but is still determined to stick to his principles.

Margot Robbie is still perfect as Harley Quinn. But something felt off with how the character was written this time. She felt different. Part of that can be attributed to character growth; this is her third film after all. But to me it felt more than that. Originally she was eccentric, but intelligent and always aware of what was going on; you could say she was crazy like a fox. This time she was... not quite there? She was very air-headed, you know? Like the bit after she's escaped when she asks if they want her to go back so they could rescue her. She didn't sound sarcastic, she sounded genuine. I'm pretty sure the way she was written in the original movie she would have understood that didn't make any sense, she probably would have made some comment about saving them the trouble instead. Overall she was still entertaining, but in some ways I prefer the first version to this one.

I really liked David Dastmalchian's Polkadot Man. He was quiet, yet very sympathetic. His death was surprisingly bittersweet in that he technically got his wish, though I really feel it deserved to be given more weight; sadly the impact was compromised by the attempt to play it off as a bit of a gag. As I said the movie had a dark sense of humor, and normally that worked, but this is one place where I think it would have been better to play it straight.

Daniela Melchior brought a lot of heart to the Ratcatcher. It's a bit of a shame she didn't really get much time to shine until nearer to the end (she literally slept through half the movie...); perhaps if she'd been more active from the start I would have felt more invested in the whole thing.

Viola Davis was great again. But like some other characters she felt a little different. In the first movie she was cold and ruthless, but not evil: ultimately she was working towards a good cause, at least in part. This time though? She threatened to kill children, and at the end she actively wanted an entire country to be destroyed by an alien creature (one that she should have known would grow stronger if left alone). Seriously: she was going to kill the team to stop them from fighting it. I mean, the chance of them surviving at all was very low, and even if they did she could have killed them later; but she really wanted an entire population of men, women, and children, to be killed by Starro. That's just evil.

I enjoyed Joel Kinnaman's Rick Flag more in this film than in the previous one, though I couldn't really tell you why. I was actually surprised by his death, though to be honest not all that moved by it; he still didn't really have that much personality.

There were a lot of fun cameos, like Taika Waititi; his brief scene was a nice little surprise in which he delivered what I found to be probably the most moving line of the whole film. I feel it's a bit of a shame that some of them didn't get a bit more screen time though. Perhaps the prime example was Michael Rooker; I was enjoying his performance but really thought they could have given him just a little more to do. Sadly the time and nature of his death was a bit of a disappointment; it would have been nice to actually see him in action, at least for a moment or two. They really did Boomerang dirty though; surely as a returning cast member he deserved a little more?


So why is Rick Flag actually here? Previously he was only really part of the Suicide Squad to protect June Moon. But she's not mentioned in this movie at all; whatever happened to her? Why is Flag still on the team now? On the other hand Killer Croc and Kitana are also missing. Croc's role has basically been filled by the CG King Shark, but I wouldn't have minded if Kitana returned with a meatier role this time; I always felt the character had far more potential than we saw in the original film.


Even Starro got a good line at the end. It kind of came out of nowhere a little bit, but I actually thought it was rather moving, and made his death a little bit poignant. It's kind of strange how the climax of the movie was lent so much emotional weight by characters who did so little for most of the runtime.


I find it interesting how this movie seems to closely copy so many of the original's beats. Some bits are so similar that I just don't think it's a coincidence. Was it a game, perhaps a little act of one-upmanship? I don't know, but let's talk about some of them.

Let's start with Bloodsport and his daughter. Bloodsport has so much in common with Will Smith's Deadshot: character archetype, costume aesthetics, position in the team, and his motivation being his relationship with his daughter. The thing is, I found Bloodsport's relationship with his daughter more realistic than Deadshot's. Teenagers are prickly, complicated, and contract killers probably aren't the most well-balanced and loving of parents. That simple sweet doting relationship between the caring father and the innocent little girl didn't feel as honest as the ugly, shouty, antagonistic relationship the self-loathing Bloodsport had with his validation-seeking daughter. It felt less cliched and tied in to a more meaningful character arc.

King Shark was a lot like Killer Croc, only with more humor and, you know, actual dialogue. On the other hand, Killer Croc at least got to justify his presence on the team by being given an underwater job that no-one else could have done. King Shark really... didn't do anything in this movie. I mean, he got a lot of laughs to be sure, but he didn't really contribute to their mission in any meaningful way. He didn't take down any opposition that no-one else could have, he didn't really do anything to Starro, he was just... an extraneous comedic sidekick.

Starro, like Enchantress, was captured by the US government and then went rogue. So once again the Suicide Squad was cleaning up their own mess. Furthermore, Starro had his little star-faced zombies just as Enchantress had her black blob zombies. Now I actually did like Enchantress and thought her betrayal worked very well, but I do feel Starro was a more unique and fun villain, and his death had more weight. And of course his zombies looked much cooler and just worked better on-screen. Plus of course no sky-beam!

Speaking of Starro, Harley Quinn using Javelin's javelin to create a vulnerability allowing Ratchatcher to finish the job was pretty much exactly the same as when she used Kitana's kitana to cut out Enchantress' heart so Deadshot could blow her up. But the Starro thing was a HELL of a lot more stylish! Although both did feel a little contrived, but then her presence on the team has never really made much sense to begin with.

Harley Quinn got separated and had a little romantic fling with one of the bad guys, but then walked away and rejoined the team on her own. Not exactly the same as when Joker came for her in the first one but there's still some parallels there.

Polkadot felt a lot like Diablo did in the first one: a broken man who didn't want any of the bloodshed. And like Diablo he died at the end doing the right thing. But whereas Diablo made the choice to fight, to knowingly sacrifice himself, Polkadot kind of just... went along with the team and did what he was told. And his death felt cheaper and less meaningful as it could have been avoided. On the other hand, Diablo was a non-entity for most of the first movie while Polkadot was more engaging throughout this one, and overall I think was just a more interesting and sympathetic character.


As mentioned the movie had a lot of small details that I appreciated when I thought about them later. For example, the fact that the "computer geeks" actually had some agency in the end; they actually mattered to the plot, not just by doing what they were told, but through their own decisions.

I liked that Bloodspot just turned around on his own to try to do the right thing at the end, without needing someone else to lecture him first. I don't know why movies always feel the need to have another character lecture the protagonist for them to find their concience; having Bloodsport do it on his own volition without anyone staring at him expectantly or shaming him into it was nice.

I loved when Harley Quinn shot Briscoe. I was kind of getting annoyed with the whole "falling in love" sequence; it just wasn't working for me. And then suddenly she shot him. No drawing the moment out, no painful deliberation about what to do: she realised he needed to die and she did it, without hesitation. I honestly feel movies just don't do that enough: have a character just do what we know they need to do, without drawing it out. I also appreciate that she didn't need to be rescued. I'm not saying there would have been anything wrong if she did, it would have just been a bit clichéd.


I was a little surprised that Rick Flag was on the sacrificial team. It's like Waller WANTED him dead? Perhaps she knew he was too straight-laced and was going to be a problem in the future and wanted him out of the way? In the original she kind of used June Moon to control him, with June seemingly not being in the picture anymore and Waller perhaps not needing him now that her program is more established, perhaps she decided it was time to tie up loose ends?


I was kind of happy when I saw that Weasel survived at the end. Not because I liked the character, but because it somehow gave more meaning to Savant's death: at least he managed to save someone before he died. But on the other hand didn't they say that Weasel had killed like twenty-something children? And now this guy is loose on a tiny island nation that's already seen so much death and suffering? I am... concerned.


Bloodsport's armament was weird (and ugly), and massively more technologically advanced than what Peacemaker was running. I'm not familiar with the character in the comics so I dont' know if he has this crazy morphing weapon tech there, but it actually felt a little out of place here. Especially since it doesn't match anything we've seen in the DC movies so far, outside of maybe some alien tech. Plus it didn't really serve a purpose? There wasn't really anything that would have turned out any differently if he had just been armed with slightly more conventional weaponry.


For some reason I thought I saw Pom Klementieff in the bar scene, and kind of thought for a moment she was going to be a character - or at least a cameo. It's probably just because the movie had so many cameos already.


A very long time ago I put together a "wishlist" for a Suicide Squad movie. The original movie did not do too bad a job of living up to that list, but I will say this one arguably does it even better. There are far more deaths, some of them even more surprising. There were betrayals, and they worked pretty well. Yes, they all turned hero at the end, but it was set up much better this time; it was more consistent with what we already knew about the characters, as they had showed themselves to have redeemingly qualities during the rest of the movie. So yeah, I'm pretty happy.

The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard review

I enjoyed the first movie so I was looking forwards to this one. I wouldn't say I liked it as much, but I'm happy to report it was still a great deal of fun.

I thought the comedy mostly worked; I laughed quite a bit during this movie. The action was nothing special but, in conjunction with the humor, it worked quite well; I was entertained at least.

I did feel the movie was a little too mean-spirited though. Don't get me wrong, for the most part that led to a lot of laughs, I just feel that a little bit less, especially towards the end, would have made the film a bit more satisfying overall.

I feel that mean-spiritedness also compromised the characters a little bit. It's been a while, but to my recollection I found Michael and Darius more likeable in the original. This time around I felt that Darius really didn't have enough redeeming moments to offset his role as the infuriating foil to Micheal. And while Sonya displayed far more humanity later in the film, to me at least it didn't erase the early impression she gave of being a horribly unpleasant psychopath. Meanwhile Micheal, who despite his quirks originally came across as something of a long-suffering straight-man, now feels like a sad cartoon. I felt sorry for him, but I didn't like him very much.

Don't get me wrong, Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson were a lot of fun as expected. Antonio Banderas seemed a strange casting decision, but I really enjoyed his performance. Morgan Freeman however was perfectly cast - or maybe he's such a good actor that he made the role perfect? Salma Hayak was good, but I have to admit there were a few scenes where her performance felt a bit awkward to me. Nevertheless I believe it was a performance that not just any actress could produce.


I consider this movie a 7/10: it's entertaining, but of course not to be taken seriously.




#####SPOILER WARNING#####
I didn't like the end very much. It was actually really cruel to Michael. I mean, the whole movie was, but you would at least hope that he would get a happy ending. I think those last few laughs were not worth trading a more satisfying ending for.


Morgan Freeman was a pleasant surprise, but I just knew he was going to turn out to be a bad guy. I think it was just because of how, well, sadistic I suppose, the movie was.

Mortal Kombat (2021) movie review

I have played and greatly enjoyed many of the Mortal Kombat games. I loved the 1995 movie, and even have a soft spot for the very disappointing 1997 follow-up. Hell, I even quite liked the 1998 TV show. So yeah, I like Mortal Kombat.

But about 10 years ago, I saw a new take on the property: Legacy. That I did not like. It was Mortal Kombat without the colour, the flavour. It was Mortal Kombat if Mortal Kombat was a generic TV show. I didn't even make it through the first season. And yet I am under the vague impression that it was somewhat popular. So when I heard they were making a new movie, I was afraid it would follow in Legacy's footsteps.

I couldn't really tell very much from the trailer. I didn't read or watch any reviews, but I caught a glimpse of a couple of review headlines and they seemed to be faintly (perhaps relucantly) positive. So I tried to keep an open mind going in, but... I can't deny that I wasn't expecting it to be any good. Still, I thought the film started off well enough and I was getting into it at first. Sadly though, by the end I was actually surprised by how much I disliked it.

Let's just get this out of the way: the film does a lot of stuff quite well. Acting, costumes, sets, fight scenes, special effects: they are all quite good. Sadly they are also all completely undermined by how bad the writing is. Good actors can't do much with a bad script. Good fights don't have much impact if I don't care about the outcome. It was all just... wasted.

I'm clearly no expert, but I feel compelled to try to explain what I think is so bad about the writing, and a good place to start is the protagonist. I don't remember his name and don't want to because I don't care about him, so I shall simply refer to him as Newbie. Because he's a new fighter to the MK canon.

Think about that for a second: the primary protagonist of the Mortal Kombat movie - an adaptation of a franchise with over EIGHTY characters listed on Wikipedia - is a new character. A character who was not in the very source material the movie purports to be based on. What the HELL is that? Did the Lord of the Rings movies introduce a new character to play the primary protagonist? Was the primary protagonist of the Harry Potter movies not a character in the books? When Marvel Studios decided to start making movies based on the Avengers comics, did they make a billion dollars per movie by writing scripts centered around characters who WEREN'T in the comics? No! Of course not!

So why on God's green Earth did the writer of this film decide that not one of the extremely varied stable of beloved fan-favourite Mortal Kombat characters would be suitable for the lead of the Mortal Kombat movie? Notice that Newbie isn't on the poster; why do you think that is? That's right, it's because it wouldn't have made sense to have a Mortal Kombat movie poster starring a character nobody knows or cares about. So instead we get two extremely popular characters on the poster even though they aren't actually the main protagonists or antagonists. If it's not even a good idea for the poster, why would anyone think it was a good idea for the whole movie? Sure, sometimes you need to change the source material when adapting a property to different media, especially videogames as their interactivity sets them apart from more traditional media, but centering the entire story about around a character who isn't in the original property is far too big a departure from the source material - especially considering that the Mortal Kombat games actually have pretty strong storytelling for the medium, with a great deal of established lore and well fleshed out characters.

As I understand it the stated purpose for creating a new character was to serve as an audience surrogate: a newcomer to an existing situation who's presence helps introduce the audience to the world and the story as they learn about them through watching the character learn about them. And that's a viable and common storywriting technique. But in this case it's completely unneccessary to create a new character for that purpose; the 1995 film did the exact same thing only using existing characters, which it was easily able to do because Mortal Kombat has several who are perfectly suited for this purpose. Even the way the new movie was written there were several main protagonists who didn't know what was happening and needed to have everything explained to them, so even in the movie as written a new character was unneccessary and redundant!

No, I'm convinced the real explanation for Newbie's existence is that he's actually the writer's self-insert character. This is not a completely unfounded theory: according to mortalkombat.fandom, the screenwriter stated that Newbie's storyline "came in part from his own life". Obviously it's normal to draw from your own experiences when writing, but in this case he was writing a script for an existing property full of existing characters, and he decided to write in his own new character that he relates to, to serve as the protagonist; that's at least part of the description of a self-insert fan-fiction story.

Typically a self-insert fan-fiction story involves the author's original character meeting the established characters of a property, working with or fighting alongside them and ultimately proving instrumental in saving the day. All this happens here. Funnily enough though I didn't actually get the impression that the writer was a particularly big fan; so much of this movie just does not feel like the world of Mortal Kombat to me.

I'll leave most of this discussion to the spoilers section, but as an example: Mortal Kombat has always been set in exotic locations. Ancient temples, futuristic labratories, gothic graveyards, gladatorial arenas; environments were varied and interesting. The old movies understood this, but the new one mostly just takes place in boring normal modern day locations. It's missing so much of the flavour of the games. Another thing: the Mortal Kombat games are of course almost exclusively one-on-one fighting games. That's... kind of just a big part of what the series is. Yet the vast majority of the protagonist's fights in this movie are not one-on-one. It just doesn't feel right, not for Mortal Kombat.

So perhaps the reason why the writer chose to create a new character was because he wasn't interested in the established Mortal Kombat characters? This seems likely, and doesn't invalidate the theory that Newbie is the author's self-insert character. After all, he's written here as the Prophesized Saviour who is the Most Special Among Specials. Like, all the protagonists in the movie are technically "Chosen Ones", but Newbie is even more Chosen. It's actually quite cringe-worthy.

Unfortunately the writing suffers from more than just adaptation issues and author indulgences. Perhaps the biggest issue that the film has overall is that the characters are not very interesting. With few exceptions, most of them have very little personality. Newbie's only real personality trait is that he cares about his family. I really couldn't tell you much else about him. And if you asked me about Sonya or Jax or Liu Kang or most of the other characters I'd have even less to say. The only exceptions really are Kano and I suppose Kabal. Oh, and Raiden. He's a jerk.

They don't have much in way of story arcs either. Mild spoiler warning for this paragraph: Newbie's story arc is that he... umm... he doesn't have powers, and then he does? Sonya's arc is that she's obsessed with Mortal Kombat and feels left out that she wasn't chosen, and then she gets chosen (and gets powers). Jax loses his arms and gets sad, then he gets new ones (thanks to his new powers) and isn't sad anymore. Scorpion's arc is that he died, and then he came back with new powers. Basically pretty much every arc ends with "and then they got powers". Except Liu Kang; his arc is... um... he was... there, I think? And then he was... still there, if you looked hard enough? Or maybe he wasn't, he just kind of faded into the background to be honest.

I mean, they try to tie Newbie's arc in to his "loves his family" singular personality trait, and there's some sort of narrative hooks about him feeling like a failure and something about his defensive skills being poor or something, but they don't really matter at all. It really just felt like the writer had heard of character arcs, and that you were supposed to have them, but didn't actually understand how they work or how to write them. The result, for me at least, was that I really didn't care about any of the protagonists. Some of the villains were annoying enough for me to want them dead (some of the heroes were too... stupid Raiden), but it wasn't really enough for me to feel invested anymore. As a result I didn't care very much about anything that was happening and couldn't really enjoy anything, not even the fight scenes.

It's not like they didn't have time for more character development, or at least they would have if the movie was less bloated. I was a little surprised by how much of the movie felt unneccessary, and how many setups there were with no payoffs. Or if they did have something resembling a payoff, it often felt forced and even nonsensical; often the same result could have been achieved in more natural and streamlined way. It's like the writers never heard of Chekhov's Gun.

For example, several times in the film Newbie gets flashbacks to something that happened to his distant ancestor. That's already feels weird since he wasn't alive to witness it (normally this sort of flashback would reference forgotten memories or something like that), but the thing is that other than a brief twitch each time, he doesn't react at all to these bizarre flashbacks! He doesn't tell anyone about them, they don't influence any of his decisions; they are completely irrelevant. This is not an exaggeration: they honestly do not contribute to the plot at all in any way whatsoever. They don't affect the character, the story, or even the audience: they don't tell us anything we don't already know, they don't show us anything we haven't already seen. They are staggeringly pointless!

And even some of the elements that do theoretically serve a purpose are just not very well executed and end up feeling extraneous. Perhaps the most egregious example, there's this whole thing about a prophecy and Newbie's bloodline. Normally prophecies and legacies and that sort of thing can drive the whole plot of a movie, but in this one if you cut all that out all it would really change is a few lines of dialogue. A few lines of dialogue that aren't particularly good and don't particularly do very much. And to be honest I genuinely believe the movie would have been better without them.

Another issue I had, and I'll admit this one is arguably a lot more subjective, is that the movie took itself too seriously. Mortal Kombat is a world where angry undead ninjas clad in bright yellow fight against ancient soul-eating sorcerers, exotic kung-fu princesses, mechanically-enhanced modern-day soldiers, arrogant Hollywood action stars, fire-projecting Shaolin monks, bat-winged vampire queens, and scorpion-tailed centaurs. The characters and environments in the Mortal Kombat games have always been colourful and fantastical - even when they were dark in tone and style. Mortal Kombat has never really been gritty, realistic, or grounded; this is not a property that should be taken too seriously. The 1995 film understood that, generally maintaining a light-hearted tone. In fact the only character in this movie who is at all entertaining or engaging, the only who I've heard people say they liked, is Kano - who is also the only character who isn't taking things seriously most of the time. Coincidence?

"Taking itself seriously" might not sound like such a bad thing, but for me at least it really was. Take for example the ancient Chinese assassin, Bi-Han. We see this guy murdering people hundreds of years ago, speaking in Chinese. Then we see him in modern times, and when his boss says his name he responds that his name is now "Sub-Zero". And I could only roll my eyes. I have been a Mortal Kombat fan for around three decades, Sub-Zero is one of my very favourite characters, and yet suddenly for the first time ever I felt that his name is stupid. I mean, a Chinese assassin who has been killing people for hundreds of years suddenly decides to adopt a new name, in English, that is a vague temperature description? What, did he just now hit his teenage edgelord phase and thought it sounded cool?

And it's the same for Hanzo Hasashi: this rage-filled undead Japanese ninja suddenly announces, in Japanese, that his name is now "Scorpion" - in English! It's unbelievably stupid, and again is the very first time that I found myself thinking the name doesn't make any sense! Names like those are perfectly fine in a colourful over-the-top videogame, or a light-hearted martial-arts fantasy flick, but not in a film that wants to be taken seriously! Because Mortal Kombat shouldn't be taken too seriously. The original creators knew that, as evidenced by the fact that they added things like "babalities" to the games.

In fact this movie is taking itself so seriously that it even seems embarrassed of it's own name. Like in The Predator, the characters make fun of the actual name of the original property. I get that it's supposed to be just a little gag, a nod and a wink perhaps, but it feels more like an embarrased laugh. Like when people say your friend is weird and you're too embarassed to stand up for them, instead you just kind of force a laugh and make excuses for why you're friends with them. It just rubs me the wrong way. This property was successful and even beloved for decades before it was handed to you for the next chapter, you're being paid a lot of money and being entrusted with this thing that people care about, and you're just going to make fun of it? What gives you the right? The 1995 movie was not taking itself seriously and yet did not feel the need to make fun of the name itself. That movie embraced the source material; I wonder if this one thinks it's fixing it?

Finally, and it's a small thing but worth mentioning, the music is nowhere near as impactful as in the 90's films. It even felt a bit out of place to me once or twice.


I'm giving this movie a 5/10 - and that's me trying to at least be a little bit objective. I'm tempted to score it even lower just based on how much I disliked it. I really do hate so many of the writing decisions in this film. But hey, it has a couple of pretty gory fatalities, so at least the fans can enjoy that I guess. I've never cared that much myself to be honest.




#####SPOILER WARNING#####
OK, let's talk about the big prophecy. Where did it come from? To whom was it delivered? How did both Raiden and Shang Tsung know about it? It's implied that the Lin Kuei wiped out the Shirai Ryu because of the prophecy. But according to mortalkombat.fandom, that took place in the 17th century. The Mortal Kombat tournament takes place once every generation. A generation is, what, maybe 25 years? The 17th century was over 300 years ago; that got to be more than 10 tournaments ago, right? So longer than Earthrealm's 9-loss streak? Neither the vagueness of the prophecy's origin nor the age are that big a deal or anything, it just feels like not very much thought went into the whole thing; it's just not very fleshed out.

And it's really just not necessary. Shang Tsung didn't know that Newbie was Scorpion's descendent, he was trying to kill him for the same reason he was trying to kill ALL the Earthrealm kombatants. And Raiden shouldn't need a special excuse to want to try to help Newbie discover his strength, as he should be helping ALL the fighters with potential to be at their best to fight for Earthrealm - that's if we pretend that Raiden was trying to help Newbie all along, which is a bit of contrived explanation anyway. If Raiden didn't drop the whole "my plan worked" line then we would have just gone on believing that Raiden had thought Newbie was not good enough to help and would just be a liability, which would have been just fine story-wise.

And going back to the start, the Lin Kuei don't need a prophecy as an excuse to want to wipe out the Shirai Ryu; they are old enemies, that's really all you need to say. But if you really want more of an explanation, one that ties into the larger story, how about this: "The Shirai Ryu were Earthrealm's greatest warriors, responsible for many of Earthrealm's victories in Mortal Kombat. Jealous of their power and favour with Earthrealm's gods, the Lin Kuei fell victim to Shang Tsung's manipulation and conspired with him against the Shirai Ryu, betraying Earthrealm and joining Outworld's side in the eternal battle". To me at least, something like that would feel a bit better; it explains more about everyone's place in the world, their motivations for their actions. You know, if you feel the need for explanations at all.

Admittedly the "bloodline" bit was also used in a very vague hand-wavy way as a plot device for Scorpion's resurrection. I don't think it was a particularly good explanation anyway and I would have preferred if they had come up with something more interesting, but even as-is it didn't actually involve the prophecy itself, so you wouldn't actually need to change it if you removed the prophecy.

Overall the prophecy was completely unneccessary. In fact I would even argue that it was somewhat detrimental: if the audience believes that they know the outcome of a struggle, then they feel less tension and investment in watching it unfold. Writers often try to introduce uncertainty to countaract this, but here the writers did the exact opposite, introducing a prophecy that does nothing for the plot except tell the audience "don't worry, we already know the good guys will win in the end". I mean, of course we already knew that, but we tried to forget it so that we could enjoy the movie; and yet the writers insisted on reminding us for some reason.


By the way, on the topic of Scorpion's resurrection, why did his body disappear when he died? And why did he go to Hell anyway? Was he a bad person? All we really know about him is that he was a skilled warrior and a good family man; is that a sin? How did his resurrection work? I touched on this in the main body of the review, but Scorpion has very little screentime. And that's a problem. Not just because the poster sells this movie as being centered on the confrontation between Scorpion and Sub Zero, but also because the movie itself seems to think so as well even though it's not. See, we start off with Sub Zero killing Scorpion's clan, his family, and ultimately him. And the movie ends with Scorpion getting his revenge. That's all good stuff. But it doesn't work because those are the only two scenes with Scorpion in them! The entire rest of the movie has nothing to do with Scorpion, and gives us plenty of reasons to dislike Sub Zero other than that first scene. So when Scorpion shows up at the end the movie seems to think that it's a huge deal, like it's the payoff to a big setup. But that's not at all how it felt to me; instead when I saw Scorpion again I felt nothing. I didn't care about him, and I didn't feel invested in his conflict with Sub Zero because it happened so long ago and was so unrelated to the vast majority of the movie.

We hadn't spent any time with Scorpion; not really, not enough to care about him. Now in theory it was not only about Scorpion but also about Newbie; it was about their family fighting together. The problem is that Newbie was an orphan who didn't know anything about his past, his family, or Scorpion, and the movie never did anything to change that. Scorpion was a stranger to him. There was no connection, no sense of importance or meaning in them teaming up at the end. Newbie never even said anything to Scorpion, and I'm pretty sure that he didn't understand anything that Scorpion was saying to him as we were never given a reason to believe that Newbie spoke Japanese. Again, like so many other parts of this movie, the team-up at the end just felt like the writer was imitating things he had seen in other movies without understanding why they worked and thus failing to lay the essential groundwork.

Just for fun, let's try to re-write the movie a little so that Scorpion's involvment made more sense and had more weight. Building off my earlier suggestion of saying the Kirai Ryu's warriors had won multiple Mortal Kombat tournaments, let's say Hanzo Hasashi was the most recent winner and the current champion. Because of his strength the Lin Quei were unable to kill him; they managed instead to banish him to the Netherrealm. Raiden, having supported Hanzo during the tournament, felt guilty for not being able protect him. While Raiden has no power in the Netherrealm, he nevertheless hatched a plan to save Scorpion without any indirect involvement that would break "the rules". Perhaps by tricking Shang Tsung himself into summoning him? The movie then would be partially driven by the quest to bring Scorpion back; we could even get glimpses of him in the Netherrealm, fighting against demons and growing stronger and stuff. Hell, maybe there's something he needs to do in the Netherrealm in order to be able to make it back, like find his way to a temple with a portal in it or something. That way he would be an active participant in the movie, and could perhaps communicate with the other characters. And then when he actually comes back, it feels more like an actual payoff to a significant sub-plot. Also it all just ties Scorpion in more with the main "tournament" plot. Plus we would get to see fights in the hellish Netherrealm rather than, I dunno, a junkyard or a boxing gym.


I also like that these changes could allow us to eliminate the sub-plot about Newbie being Scorpion's descendent. That was another element that just didn't have enough positive effect on the story, mainly serving to just barely justify a few underdeveloped plot conveniences. I mean, nothing about Newbie himself was affected in any way by his connection to Scorpion; learning about his ancestry didn't fill a whole in his life or change how he viewed himself or anything. It just meant that he wasn't important for who he was, he was only important for who his ancestors were. Which is not a mentality that I am fond of.

One important thing that Newbie's bloodline did for the plot though was to justify his Mark; he was born with it because of his bloodline, and it indicated that he was "chosen". Now let's talk about those Marks. Everyone else who had a Mark got it by killing someone else who had a Mark. But where did they come from to begin with? They are supposed to indicate that you are chosen to fight in Mortal Kombat, but that doesn't quite make sense because you don't get the Mark by being chosen, you get it by doing something yourself. And yeah, you can argue that's the criteria for chosing fighters: them being able to kill an existing "Marked". But there's problems with that too: killing an existing Marked doesn't mean you're a better fighter (you might have stabbed them in their sleep), and it doesn't mean you'll be willing to fight in Mortal Kombat. As evidenced by Kano. So yeah, it's kind of a dumb system that, like everything else in this movie, wasn't very well fleshed out or explained. For example, what happens if a fighter dies to natural causes, or suicide, or is killed by someone who already has a Mark? Hell, after a single lost tournament most of the Mark holders would probably have been killed anyway. Is the Mark just lost, and the total number of Marked fighters is continually on the decline, or are new Marks introduced somehow?

But unlike so many other things in this movie, the Marks actually genuinely mattered to the plot, influencing events, character actions, and motivations. And what's more they actually led to some interesting story beats, like Sonya being faced with the option of killing Kano to take his Mark. So while I'm not a fan of the concept, especially as it's a deviation from the existing Mortal Kombat lore, I will admit that they did use it effectively in this movie.

Which is one reson why I think the way Newbie was the only one born with the Mark was a mis-step. I mean, the movie already has a system for explaining Chosen One characters, why did they have to introduce an inconsistency to that system just to make Newbie "even more special"? When we first see Newbie he's in a slump: he's looking down, he's losing fights that's getting paid way too little money for; he looks damaged. But we never find out what damaged him. He's just like that, for no real reason. But what if the reason was guilt? What if he feels guilty because he killed someone once; perhaps he killed another fighter in the ring by accident? Of course he feels terrible about it. And now he has this tattoo that doesn't remember getting; did he get it after going on a bender to try to forget his pain? He would quit fighting if he could, but he just can't seem to make ends meet without it, so he has to relucantly fight to support his family. But he's always hesistating now, too scared that he might accidentally kill again, so he always loses and can only get these crappy fights.

Isn't that more interesting than just "he loses fight for no reason and also he was born with this Mark"? Now when he gains his powers it's not because he just "wanted to protect his family", it's because he overcame his trauma and learned to forgive himself in order to protect his family. Or something like that; you could probably spin it in different ways, but pretty much anything you do with that setup would be more interesting and engaging that the nothing that we got. With that you get rid of the bloodline bit and now he's not a Special, a Chosen One, he's a regular guy who got pulled into an extraordinary situation and rose to the occasion. And isn't that more compelling, more relatable?

And with very minor changes we could apply almost the same storyline to an existing character rather than creating a new one. Imagine Jax as a retired special forces veteran with mild PTSD who now participates in cage fights to provide for his family - in the games he has a daughter so that part of the story doesn't need to change. Meanwhile we see Sonya capture Kano. While interrogating him she notices he has the same dragon tattoo as Jax; Kano claims it appeared on his skin on it's own. This reminds Sonya that she first noticed Jax's tattoo immedately after the traumatic event that led him to retire. When she had mentioned it back then Jax didn't remember getting the tattoo, but neither of them thought too much of it since it didn't seem important at the time. Realizing now that there might be more to it, she contacts Jax about the tattoo. Outworld's forces attack, the rest of the movie can play out pretty much the same.


While we're making changes, let's just have Scorpion beat Sub-Zero himself in a one-on-one fight, now that he's grown stronger from battling in the Netherrealm. It's a more cathartic resolution that benefits from the "getting knocked down then coming back stronger" trope that works so well, especially in movies about fighting. We could have Newbie defeat Goro or Shang Tsung in the final fight or something if we really have to pretend that he's the main character (sending Goro after Newbie earlier on was a weird decision anyway). One-on-one fights are kind of Mortal Kombat's thing after all, and personally I would have just found the final battle far more satisfying if it was a fair fight - or even an unfair fight where the odds were stacked against the heroes and they triumphed in spite of it!

Now multiple protagonists working together to take down a single powerful antagonist can work very well, but in this case the whole movie was about a tournament, and part of the plot was that the villains were cheating to win. And yet the antagonists never actually teamed up against a single protagonist; even when they ambushed them in the temple and had a numerical advantage, they attacked the Earthrealm fighters in one-on-one combat. And yet our protagonists, our heroes, kept double-teaming the Outworld fighters! It just doesn't work thematically; villains are supposed to use underhanded methods to defeat the heroes so that we hate them and support the heroes. But Sub Zero fought Scorpion in a one-on-one battle at the start, he went after Newbie alone and fought Jax one-on-one, Kabal attacked Liu Kang alone, and Shang Tsung sat back and watched while Nitara fought Kung Lao.

So it just feels wrong when our "heroes" win in an unfair fight at the end. In fact, our main protagonist never actually wins a one-on-one fight in the entire movie! He loses his first fight to a low-level MMA fighter, he fights Reptile alongside Sonya and Kano (and it's Kano who actually finishes the fight), he only manages to defeat Goro because his wife stabbed Goro with a knife and drew him away for long enough for Newbie to recover, he only succeeds in holding off Mileena until Sonya shows up to finish her, and then only barely manages to defeat Sub Zero alongside Scorpion. It's really weird, and very unsatisfying. Why is this guy even the primary protagonist? Sonya defeats Kano on her own, Jax takes down Reiko one-on-one, Kung Lao defeats Nitara without any help and Liu Kang triumphs over Kabal alone, and Scorpion actually takes down a bunch of Lin Kuei on his own. Why is Newbie the "prophecied saviour" when he has the worst track record of any of the Earthrealm fighters, even at the end? I hate it so much.


By the way: in the last fight Scorpion has a sword (that he picked up in hell?) and his spear, while Sub Zero is unarmed. And he still needed help from Newbie. Apparently Scorpion is a wimp.


I didn't really like the fact that the protagonists lost most of the fights throughout the movie. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that; having the protagonists on the back foot through most of a movie can work very well. It's just that this is a martial arts movie: a lot of the fun comes from the individual fights. And as our protagonists were losing the fights through most of the run-time, it just wasn't as much fun.


In the movie the Earthrealm fighters all got their powers from the Mark. I didn't like this, I felt it shows a lack of familiarity with Mortal Kombat: in the games all the characters come from different backgrounds and have different fighting styles, weapons, and abilities - that come from different sources. By making all the powers come from the same source, it makes the world feel smaller, less diverse, less interesting. By the way, do the Outworld fighters get their powers from Marks? It's not mentioned in the movie. It doesn't really matter, but I'm just curious as it ties into the nature of power in this world, and could create a whole secondary power struggle as each side could try to aquire more Marks by killing the other side's Mark holders.

By the way, did Scorpion have a mark? There was a very strange part at the start of the movie where Scorpion's son gestures at Sub Zero's arm, and then Sub Zero looks down in surprise and there's some ice and what looked like a bit of blood on his arm. He looks back up and asks if the child's father had taught him that. I didn't understand what that meant, it seemed like the boy had frozen Sub Zero's arm a little? Which didn't make any sense? Whatever it was, something must have happened that wasn't just a gesture. But what? Was it some sort of power? It felt like it, but does that mean the boy had a Mark? Did Scorpion even have a Mark? We were never told, and he never manifested any special abilities in that scene (other than the ability to not hear the sounds of combat and death from what didn't seem like very far away). At the end Scorpion says he learned to harness the power of hell; since we were told that all powers come from the Marks, I assume that meant he had a Mark but hadn't learned to use the power until after death? I don't know.


How did Jax find Newbie? How did Sub Zero find Newbie? How did Reptile find Sonya? How did Goro find Newbie's family? How come Liu Kang was able to find the severely injured Jax before he died, yet he couldn't find any of the Marked at any other time? We are never told how anyone found anyone in this movie, which isn't a huge deal individually but it just happens so often and feels a bit strange when characters are specifically hiding and then someone else just shows up with no explanation. What's more, I understand that Jax and Sonya had only recently started searching for Mark holders and I assume stumbled onto a photo of Newbie with his mark visible or something, but I don't understand why Sub Zero showed up at exactly the same time and not earlier. After all, he'd been killing Earthrealm champions for hundreds of years. If he tracked them down with magical means then why didn't he track down Newbie years ago? And if he used mundane means, why did he find Newbie at the exact same time that Jax did? Now a better writer would have given us an inciting incident; something like a televised match where Newbie's Mark was visible so both sides learned about it at the same time. But in this movie? Just happens, no reason why.


Just want to point out: Newbie's story arc isn't that he quit and then came back; he was up for the fight from the start, but Raiden told him to get lost. He didn't quit, he was fired.


If the Shirai Ryu were such an awesome warrior clan as was implied, then how were they taken down so easily by the Lin Kuei? And did the Lin Kuei not see Scorpion walking off to get some water? Like, had they not surrounded the village, or at least spent a few minutes watching before they charged in? I dunno. BTW, when Scorpion told his wife he loved her, she had such a weird expression. It was like she was confused and didn't know how to react. They had two children at this point, it's not like this relationship stuff was new to them!


Why did they write Kung Lao's death? Like, what was the story/narrative reason/payoff? It feels like it's supposed to make the situation more desperate than ever, but it happens at the same time that Newbie and Jax find their powers, so right afterward his death the heroes are actually in a BETTER place than just before! We didn't care about him so it didn't really affect us as a death for it's own sake. It seems like it's supposed to motivate Liu Kang, but he's such a minor part of the movie and his part is actually even smaller afterwards, so it's meaningless for that. There was just no reason, no payoff. Hell, the character didn't even add anything before he died, and nobody really mentioned him after he died, so both his life and death were just meaningless. Pretty sure he's only in the movie for that one single fatality.

I also want to say that it looked really avoidable. Blame it on the editing, but it is what it is: it took forever, he didn't even try to fight back, Newbie was very close by but didn't do anything (he could have at least thrown his tonfa or something?), Liu Kang just stood there shouting "No" and reaching pointlessly with his arm for like half an hour but didn't try to like throw a fireball to interrupt or anything, Raiden didn't think to poke his head back and see why his Kung Lao hadn't teleported. It didn't help that I know enough about the Mortal Kombat to know that Shang Tsung is a regular human sorcerer and can't just pull out anyone's soul any time; he can only really do it to a fighter if they are too weak to fight back (i.e. after they are defeated), and Kung Lao was untounched. Again, it felt too different from the source material. It could have worked, but the way it turned out it just didn't; I just found it annoying.


It's a very minor thing, but there were a couple of slightly weird edits in the fights, where things didn't transition very smoothly. It's a very very minor thing, it just threw me off a tiny bit during a couple of fights so I wanted to mention it for my own satisfaction.


What was that bit with Kano drawing a comic for? Was that supposed to go anywhere, or tell us anything? It was just weird.


It feels like they were trying to set up a subplot about Newbie having poor defense when fighting? Which doesn't really makes sense to me, but it felt like, you know, there was going to be and arc where he learns how to defend himself properly and that would let him win or something? But that didn't happen. There wasn't really a payoff? I mean you can argue that his power was a suit of armour, and somehow that's payoff to that setup, but it's weird. Especially since his power wasn't just armour, but also a pair of weapons. Weapons with good defensive properties perhaps, but still weapons; his power was both defensive AND offensive, meaning it didn't really feel like a payoff? There was also something with his daughter telling him to uppercut or something, I dunno, that didn't feel important either.


So there's talk of rules; the whole point of all this is a tournament that allows one side to invade the other. So really it's all happening because there's a governing body that controls stuff. But the Outworld is quite openly cheating consistently without any apparant fear of consquences - Shang Tsung doesn't seem bothered that Raiden knows what's happening, and Raiden has known for a while (he knows what happened to the Shirai Ryu). So there's no-one enforcing the rules? At all? Honestly, what is even the point of the whole thing if the rules don't matter at all? Is there even a tournament? Newbie and Scorpion (who may not even be Marked) defeated Sub Zero in a two-on-one fight with civilians involved in a random location chosen by Sub Zero, and when it was over everybody just acted like that was it, Earthrealm had won. Why? Did that battle actually count as the tournament? Why was that completely unfair battle "the tournament" when it and everything that led to it was under-the-table cheating? What is even happening? Does anything even matter? Not in this movie it seems.

Hell, if no-one is enforcing the rules, why doesn't Raiden do anything when the Outworlders are openly cheating right in front of him? He said he's not allowed to interfere, and yet he does, just in the least effective way possible. I mean, he shot Kano, his own fighter, with a lightning bolt just for being a little bit annoying. Yet he can't spare one for the cheating outworlders who are trying to kill his fighters? After it's all over, after Newbie told him what to do, Newbie asks Raiden "I thought you weren't allowed to interfere?". If you didn't think he was allowed to interfere, and you thought what he did was interfering, why did you casually ask him to do it? There's just no logic.


Scorpion's legendary harpoon/spear, one of the most iconic elements in the series, is actually a gardening implement. Think about that for a moment. It's not a specialised ninja weapon forged by a skilled blacksmith from hardened steel, but just a cheap little gardening utensil. It's almost certainly not made of steel, it's probably just bronze. I dont' think it's even sharp - why would it be? I understand that the goal was to imbue it with emotional significance as it's a reminder of his wife, but actually you've just made it a whole lot less cool. It's not like the spear needed an explanation; it's a ninja weapon. He was carrying his sword around, no particular reason he wouldn't be carrying his rope-spear as well.

Speaking of the spear, in the end Sub Zero is defeated when Newbie redirects the spear mid-flight. Where did he learn to do something like that? He's a cage fighter, why would he know anything about exotic roped weapons? Sure, it's just a movie, but it still felt weird that he was able to pull off this difficult martial arts move that was just completely out of his wheelhouse. It just came out of nowhere. It's like if there was a movie about a cowboy, and the whole movie he's winning gunfights, and then his last opponent is a samurai who deflects the cowboy's bullets with his sword, so the cowboy picks up a sword himself and beats the Samurai in a swordfight. That wouldn't make any sense right? Not if the movie didn't establish at some point that the cowboy was also an amazing swordfighter for some reason.

Now of course that's a severely exaggerated example, but it does serve to illustrate the idea: protagonists suddenly displaying rare skills they have no reason to possess usually requires an explanation. The same is true of Newbie's new tonfa of course, but I feel like unarmed combat skills carry over to the use of tonfa to some extent, plus they are part of his "powers", so I personally didn't find it too strange for him to be able to fight with them effectively. But that rope trick did feel "wrong" and take me out of the fight (even more than I already was), which is a problem when it was practically the final blow of the movie.


Sub-Zero killed Scorpion by stabbing him in the shoulder, which in context feels surprisingly... non-lethal. Which it is, because after Sub Zero walks off casually assuming Scorpion is dead, Scorpion turns out to still be alive. For a couple of minutes, a couple of minutes in which he... just crawls a few feet, achieving nothing. And then his body dissappeared for some reason? What was the point of all that? Again, it just didn't serve any purpose!


The final battle takes place in a beat-up old boxing gym. Yeah, it's been covered in ice, but it's still a very boring and mundane location, arguably the least interesting in the whole film. The final battle is supposed to happen in the MOST impressive location, not the LEAST! It was very underwhelming.

Anyway, Scorpion and Newbie are facing off against Sub Zero together. They gain a momentary advantage, at which point... Newbie randomly just turns his back on the fight for no reason. Yeah, you can explain it as "he was worried about his family", but a moment ago he turned to face Sub Zero, and then suddenly he just turns away. It just felt so random and stupid. Anyway, Scorpion then just stands there watching for far too long while Sub Zero recovers, regains his weapon, removes his armour, and with a big flourish sends a line of ice along the ground at Scorpion, who doesn't even try to dodge. It was all pretty stupid and forced.

Sub Zero fights real well with his sword after getting skewered through his sword-arm (Scorpion probably should have aimed for the heart, but whatever), and even keeps fighting for a bit after getting stabbed right through the chest. That at least was true to the games I guess? But then Scorpion vomits hellfire all over him for an extended period of time, hellfire hot enough to even burn Scorpion's face off, after which Sub Zero is... very very lightly singed? I mean it's barely noticeable. That part was a lot less true to the games, and just generally very unsatisfying; I think we were all expecting to see a blackened skeleton at that point. I mean, a few minutes ago we saw a woman get cut in half - and we saw what was inside those halves - and now, in the final battle, they're not going to give us a proper fatality? What's up with that? What was the point of all the hellfire then?


I guess Newbie's magic armour absorbed energy when hit and then let it back out offensively or something? You know, the Black Panther thing. But only for one fight? And it wasn't even the last fight; his armour was apparently neutralised by Sub Zero's cold somehow. So... what was actually the point of that ability?


They actually included Nitara, a character who is barely seen outside of one single game in the series, but didn't include Kitana or Cage or Stryker or Nightwolf or Jade or any number of other fan-favourite characters. And of course the movie version was completely different in every way from the game version. And despite having a reasonable amount of screen-time, her inclusion was actually still completely pointless and added nothing to the movie. Except for some gore I suppose.


The first time they meet Liu Kang walks purposefully towards Sonya, Newbie and Kano. Kano holds up his hand and tells him to stop, a fair thing to ask. To which Liu Kang responds by attacking his fellow fighters with a fireball... after which he immediately follows up by saying he's not their enemy. Yer actions don't match yet words mate! I mean it was funny, but really didn't make any sense. Neither did the fact that he told them to follow him, then started walking back the way they came from! I mean, it's not like it can't be explained, but it was just really weird and a little distracting. Why would he not lead them back the way he came from?

He leads them to the temple where they're supposed to train. But how were they supposed to know about it? Why didn't he contact them before? Sonya was actively looking for the temple and any information about Mortal Kombat, if he couldn't find her when she was basically looking for him how was he supposed to find anyone? Why was it even his job, shouldn't it have been Raiden's or something? It's no wonder Earthrealm was losing every battle, they were completely disorganised!

Liu Kang's fire didn't actually do anything by the way. To Kano or anyone else. It was just a joke really. It was kind of painful to see how the movie portrayed him.