A fairly busy July with 8 films!
Heads of State
Heads of State is a cliche-ridden, slop action film by Prime.
Idris Elba and John Cena play the British Prime Minister and US President respectively. Circumstance takes them from not liking each other to friends over the course of the runtime. There’s very little new or interesting here, a couple of action sequences aside.
Bad.
The Old Guard 2
The first Old Guard was a fun two hours, with some heavy-handed world building. The Old Guard 2, meanwhile, is a lot of heavy-handed world building, with maybe one good action sequence.
In trying to pad out the world and bring in new threats, the film is left feeling entirely unfinished. The main plot stops long before any kind of conclusion is reached, as they clearly want to build out an even bigger franchise.
Fairly boring.
Warfare
Alex Garland’s most intimate film to date is about war. Warfare is kept almost entirely within a single building under siege, and the soldiers trapped inside.
The tension is a slow build that never becomes a full-blow crescendo, instead focussing on small moments. Very good for both the action, and the human moments.
The Surfer
I’m hit or miss on Nicholas Cage, but The Surfer is definitely a hit for me.
It’s a fever dream of a film: a man goes to buy his childhood home near the beach he used to surf in, but a gang makes it clear he doesn’t belong. The world shifts around him, and you’re left not knowing what’s real and what’s him simply losing his mind.
Very good.
Superman
The latest attempt to build a cinematic universe to rival Marvel appears in DC’s Superman.
It’s… fine. It smartly skips all of the origin story that we’ve seen too many times, but doesn’t spend a lot of time replacing it with a particularly interesting plot. Nicholas Hoult is great as Lex Luthor, but that’s maybe the high point. Everything else is one disconnected sequence after another, with a bunch of cameos crammed in to pad things out.
Mindless spectacle.
Fantastic Four: First Steps
It’s not high praise to say that Fantastic Four: First Steps is the best Fantastic Four film we’ve gotten, so poor were the other attempts.
Setting the movie in a 60s Americana universe was a smart choice, helping us move passed the goofiness inherent in the characters. The story is a fairly straight forward FF story: the Silver Surfer heralds the coming of Galactus as Sue Storm is about to have a child, so the heroes have to come up with a plan to stop a world-eating god.
Honestly, it’s what you’d want: enormous, sugary spectacle. The plot slows down a lot around the 2/3rds mark, but it has enough good will to get you to the end.
Decent.
Happy Gilmore 2
Making a sequel to a (somewhat dated) classic is difficult, and the makers of Happy Gilmore 2 seem to think the best way of tackling that is mostly a bunch of references to the original.
Like many legacy sequels, this lacks any kind of originality or character. It’s a pale shadow of the original, and absolutely cannot stand on its own.
Avoid.
Megan 2.0
Megan 2.0 makes the regrettable choice of switching genres from horror to action-tinged comedy. Or maybe it was supposed to be comedy-tinged action. It’s not really successful at either.
I genuinely can’t remember a great deal about this film, other than feeling bored and checking the remaining runtime.
Meh.
The July Winner
The July winner is The Surfer. I don’t know if I’d reach for it again soon, but it left a lasting impression.