Shaydeknight
Plex Pass
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Unido en 2015
- The End of Oak Street
The End of Oak Street is an earnest attempt at recreating the texture of an early 1980s Spielberg picture, and on that narrow front, it largely succeeds. The wardrobe, the production design, and the props are all handled with genuine care. Spotting a Simon left casually on the living room table was a lovely touch, the sort of detail that signals someone on the crew actually understood the period rather than just Googling it. Unfortunately, the film is let down badly by its writing. Watching the whole thing was a slog. The dialogues are flat and lifeless, and the characters never rise above two dimensions; they're boring in a way that no amount of nostalgic set dressing can disguise. The action is disappointing, so much so that you can actually see the actors acting. Meaning, they LOOK like they know they're on a sound stage dodging CGI beasties. The CGI is passable, but only just. It has the look and feel of something made in 2002, not 2026. Everything about the picture is tedious. The manufactured conflict between the central couple, engineered purely so they can reconcile later, is trite and hackneyed to the point where you can see it coming from a mile off. Every subplot feels intensely unnecessary and delivers no payoff whatsoever. They exist as little tricks meant to suggest depth and complexity in the characters, but each one is superficial window dressing, papering over the fact that there is no real story here beyond the obvious: "Oh look, our neighbourhood has slipped into the late Jurassic period." Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway have about as much chemistry as water does with, well, more water. Every scene between them feels disconnected and wearisome. Further, true to form for 2026, the film renders its male lead as weak, stupid, and largely superfluous, a pattern that has become so blatant and so much a fixture of the broader push toward white male supplantation in contemporary storytelling that it hardly seems worth dwelling on any further. In the end, there's no actual story to speak of. Just a concept, padded out with a great deal of inane detail in the hope that people might not notice there's nothing there. It's a failure in just about every possible way.The End of Oak Street - Centurion
Centurion is a good period film. Neil Marshall builds a genuinely convincing atmosphere for the era, and the historical slips that do creep in are unlikely to trouble anyone but the most dedicated pedant. Roman cavalry using stirrups, an army marching without scouts or any real effort to secure high ground, ornate bracers straight out of a 1950s gladiator picture: these are the sorts of details that only reveal themselves under close scrutiny, and I doubt most viewers will clock any of them. Michael Fassbender does quite a good job in the lead. The film arrived at an interesting juncture in his career, right as Hollywood was still working out where to place him. His performance as Bobby Sands in Hunger had put him on the map, which in turn opened the door to Inglourious Basterds in 2009, a role that, thanks to a famously memorable "faux pas" scene, pushed him firmly into the front rank of actors to watch. Centurion arrived in 2010, effectively a test of whether audiences would accept him carrying an ensemble piece, a year before X-Men: First Class handed him a much larger ensemble within an established franchise and confirmed his path to stardom. Here, even though the film is very much an ensemble effort, Fassbender gets to lead and shine as a charming, decent protagonist. He doesn't steal the show outright, but he demonstrates real physicality, evident commitment to the role, and a knack for calm, commanding screen presence. The rest of the cast does a wonderful job of keeping the story moving along with him. Where the film stumbles is in its battlefield gore. A great deal of it plainly relies on CGI, with blood spurting and showering in a manner that draws attention to itself as a visual effect rather than disappearing into the action. It comes across as gratuitous and, worse, noticeable, which makes it harder to suspend disbelief and stay immersed. This is a little surprising given that Marshall has said around ninety per cent of the film's wound and gore effects were achieved practically on set, using upwards of two hundred litres of fake blood. Whatever the ratio behind the scenes, the CGI sprays that do appear are the ones that stick out, and they undercut a lot of otherwise strong practical work. The plot is solid, though its basic shape has echoes of Deliverance or O Brother, Where Art Thou?: a group of men who have done something find themselves hunted, and the bulk of the film becomes a matter of watching them hide, flee, and occasionally fight back. It's not a bad structure, but the Romans do seem oddly lacking in tactical sense as they're run down time after time by a pursuing force of perhaps half a dozen Picts. Imogen Poots is lovely here, stunning and entirely natural in her role, which makes it something of a shame that such an unfortunate name belongs to such a gorgeous and talented young woman. She put me in mind, for whatever reason, of Beatie Edney playing Heather MacLeod in Highlander. All told, Centurion is a good watch for anyone partial to sword-and-sandal films. It plays as an updated peplum picture, carried by a rising star, backed by solid production values, and offering its own answer to the old question of what became of the Ninth Legion.Centurion - The Last House
The Last House is a film I neither loved nor loathed. It progresses reasonably well as a piece of storytelling, but it never quite becomes a satisfying experience, largely because it can't be bothered to work out the mechanics of its own premise. The central problem is one of logistics. The film feels sanitized, scrubbed clean of the grim, unglamorous detail that a family sealed inside a single house for for a long period of time would actually have to contend with. I kept snagging on questions the script never bothers to raise, let alone answer. What did this family do with their waste and their packaging? Where did they obtain feminine hygiene products? How did they avoid illness from their food (a question that will make more sense to anyone who has actually seen the film)? None of these are pedantic nitpicks, they're the basic, unglamorous realities of prolonged survival, and a film that wants to be taken as science fiction, rather than fable, has an obligation to at least attempt to be coherent. In many ways, the movie veers into the procedural genre, but not sufficiently to respond to the dozens of nagging questions you're left with when you watch it. That failure points to a larger issue, one I have encountered in other films that fancy themselves to be sci-fi: the moment a story can't define the rules of its own reality clearly enough to hold together, it quietly slides from science fiction into fantasy, whether or not the filmmakers intend that shift. I've never been able to fully embrace Old, Snowpiercer, or Us for precisely this reason. All three are competent films on their own terms, but each sets up a scenario dressed in the trappings of realism, then simply glosses over how that scenario could plausibly function, leaving the viewer to accept it only as metaphor rather than as a world with internal logic. Contrast this lack of rigour with a film like Beau Is Afraid, where reality is warped from the outset and never pretends otherwise, not even tacitly: because the film never claims coherence, its lack of it isn't a flaw. The Last House wants to have it both ways: grounded and plausible on the surface, yet riddled with holes the moment you think about it for more than a few seconds. On the other hand the film has real strengths. The various actors who play the family all turn in excellent performances, and the production values are strong throughout. I found two elements to be unnecessary, though. The voiceover is just intrusive. It adds very little and tries to explains too much. And the ending is far too pat, tipping over into the hackneyed and the schmaltzy just when the film ought to have gone for something harder-won. Ultimately, the film's erratic subplots, weak dialogue, and ridiculous, disconnected climax leave the overwhelming impression of an unpolished, nonsensical trial run for an AI-generated script. Even so, taken as a whole, The Last House is an OK way to pass a Saturday afternoon. It's nothing to write home about, and it won't change your life, but it never becomes actively unpleasant to sit through either.The Last House - Mutiny
Mutiny is a decent little action picture, competently made and worth an evening's attention, though it stumbles before it even gets going by failing to understand the meaning of its own title. A mutiny occurs when soldiers or sailors refuse to obey orders and attempt to wrest control from leaders. Statham's character, on the other hand, infiltrates a cargo ship to uncover who's behind an assassination. He's not a crewman, so he can therefore neither incite nor be party to a mutiny. The female lead, Angie (Annabelle Wallis), is the one character actually positioned within the ship's chain of command who could plausibly lead one, but that's not what happens here either. The film starts, in effect, a point down before the opening credits finish, simply for not understanding the word on its own poster. Statham, once again, plays a version of the character he has played in just about every film he does outside of the Ritchie-verse. Credit where it's due, though: this time he's an active working professional, a bodyguard doing his job, rather than a retired cop or spy dragged back into violence against his will. That's a genuine, if modest, departure from his last few formulaic films, and I'm inclined to cut him some slack for it. Also, I recently came across an interview in which he described his own career with a candour worth quoting: "I'm not an actor, really. I used to work with jewellery and pinch jewellery on the streets. I was a sportsman for years. I am not really some thespian who can adapt and chameleon himself into different roles. I just got into this by being at the right place at the right time. I got plucked from obscurity into the movie industry. It's not like I spent years honing how to do different accents or working on my craft. I accept what I'm good at and just try to go with the flow in that direction." I find that admission remarkably humble, realistic, and self-aware. Good for Mr. Statham! There's something to respect in a man who works within his limits rather than straining against them. It was, by his own account, sheer luck that a casting agent was taken with him and his market-stall street patter and offered him an audition for Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Statham seems to know precisely how fortunate that break was, and he's had the good sense not to jinx it by reaching for roles he was never suited to. The film itself offers a basic, thoroughly predictable plot, built on themes as simple and universal as they come: greed is corrosive, family is worth protecting, and decent men don't act like schmucks. The acting is fine across the board, and the ship itself is a nice touch, its cramped corridors and gangways giving the action a claustrophobic quality that a soundstage could never quite replicate. None of it amounts to anything more than what it sets out to be, and that's absolutely fine. Mutiny requires zero thought, it's easy to watch, and it offer a great opportunity to root for a good guy. It's sheer brain-dead entertainment, but delivered wholly without pretence.Mutiny - Thieves Highway
Thieves Highway is a film I wanted to like, and in some ways I did, but ultimately its hampered by its adherence to a hackneyed formula. The setting is genuinely gripping. I'm nowhere close to being a rancher and don't understand that world in the slightest, so it was fascinating to learn even a little about it. It blew my mind, in fact, that livestock police working for the Agriculture Department are a real thing in America. Aaron Eckhart plays Frank Bennett, a "cow cop" whose primary job is to investigate and shut down rustlers, still a real problem in a country as expansive as the USA. I knew nothing about any of this beforehand, and even if it served only as the backdrop for a work of fiction, it still engagingly showed what daily life was like elsewhere. Beyond that setting, though, the film is so formulaic that I found it almost impossible to sit through without laughing at points where laughter clearly wasn't intended. The structure announces itself early: Frank pays a visit to his mentor for a heart-to-heart about professional responsibility and conscience, the sort of scene meant to set the moral tone for everything that follows. Shortly afterwards, in a diner, Frank's partner mentions that he has one day left before he moves to a desk job, on account of a fourth child on the way. I nearly fell off my chair laughing, and I mean that literally, not figuratively, because the scene plays out almost exactly like the old Simpsons parody of McBain In that episode, they flash to a McBain scene where his partner Scoey talks about retiring in two days, how his daughter is graduating soon, and how he and his wife intend to sail around on their boat, the "Live-4-Ever". Moments later, he's shot to pieces by henchmen sent by the villain, Mendoza. That gag exists to mock films like Lethal Weapon and the glut of 1980s buddy-cop pictures where similar plot devices were used. Thieves Highway actually makes a dead serious attempt at recycling that hackneyed trope, a plot device so worn out that the only place you can find it used with any degree of success is in parody. "MENDOZAAAAAAAAAAA!!!" LOL Amid all this, Frank also decides to woo an old crush who has conveniently returned to town just as the film's plot kicks into gear. I don't understand why the filmmakers felt a romantic subplot was necessary here, it added nothing and the story would have lost little without it. From there, the film unfolds exactly as you would expect. There isn't a single surprise or a fresh idea anywhere in it, only Eckhart straining for intensity and earnestness that never quite arrives. He comes across rather like a second-year acting student, working hard to inject gravitas through aspirated line readings and meaningful pauses that don't land the way he intends. The acting, then, is mediocre, the camera work and direction are fine but staid, and the setting is genuinely wonderful. None of it comes together, though. The film aims for intense, gripping storytelling and never once reaches that goal.Thieves Highway - No Reservations
No Reservations is a cute romcom, with a hint of darkness and a splash of tragedy running beneath its otherwise light surface. The setup carries real emotional weight. Kate (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a talented but exacting New York chef, is left to raise her niece Zoe (Abigail Breslin) after Zoe's mother, Kate's sister, dies in a car accident. The arrangement is difficult from the start. Kate has no idea how to care for a child, and Zoe is struggling to adjust to a life she never asked for. Kate's chaotic hours at the restaurant only compound the strain, and things unravel to the point where Paula (Patricia Clarkson) brings in another chef, Nick (Aaron Eckhart), to help pick up the slack. Unfortunately, what follows is remarkably derivative and predictable. Kate and Nick hate each other initially, then fall for each other, in a manner so telegraphed that one can predict nearly every scene days before it arrives. It's about the most tired script I've seen in a long while, and the film never once deviates from it: no surprises, no curveballs, nothing left to chance. The writing is so schmaltzy, so saccharine, so sappy, that one has to wonder why the filmmakers bothered reaching for the emotional material they had (a dead parent, a grieving child) only to bury it under a romantic formula this well-worn. Given the strength of that setup, the script feels like a genuine missed opportunity, one step up from a Hallmark movie and not much more. The cast does a great job with what they're given. Zeta-Jones and Eckhart have decent chemistry, and Breslin holds her own, but no amount of skilled performance can inject surprise into a story that refuses to offer any. The direction is fine and the acting is fine; the story itself is merely adequate and the characters are so stereotypical they make you want to laugh. All in all, No Reservations is watchable but forgettable, more a romcom template than a fresh film. Stick with the original German version Mostly Martha, it's just a better film.No Reservations - Killer Elite
Killer Elite is a great ensemble effort. The dynamic between Jason Statham and Clive Owen, however, is the genuine high point of the film. Owen, in particular, elevates the film, and the tension between the two men gives the picture its spine. Robert De Niro turns in strong work here, no small feat considering I'm not usually a fan of his. It is also nice seeing Dominic Purcell get some screen time, he's an actor I've always liked. One has to wonder whether Statham is capable of playing a character who doesn't retire from a life of violence only to be dragged back into it within the first ten minutes. It's the plot of roughly 93% cent of his filmography. This time, however, it works, and I attribute that success to excellent writing and to Owen's presence, since he's the better actor of the two by a WIDE margin. The action sequences are well executed and restrained rather than offering Michael Bay style excess. Everything feels more contained and, as a result, slightly more realistic. The film offers some pretty wicked commentary on British intrusiveness and warmongering. It really goes out of its way to tell a fantastic story, one inspired by actual events. The costuming is good and captures the era convincingly, with one exception: the suits, for whatever reason, never quite land the transition from the seventies into the eighties. The scenery and use of sets and locations are fantastic. The filmmakers clearly went out of their way to try to make the viewer feel absorbed in the setting. The romantic subplot, on the other hand, seems entirely unnecessary and obtrusive. Part of the problem is that Statham simply can't do romance, he's too wooden, too boring, to pull it off. Yvonne Strahovski does what she can with him, but she's bogged down by Statham's utter lack of emotional range. All in all, Killer Elite is a decent political action thriller.Killer Elite - Bad Boys
This is Michael Bay's first big action movie, and it clearly establishes what the rest of his career is going to be about: "splosions", and lots of them. The plot is thin: drugs get stolen, and the two leads have to get them back. Along the way, Martin Lawrence's character has to impersonate Will Smith's in order to convince a remarkably attractive but kind of whiny Téa Leoni that she can trust the police, and for some reason they keep up the charade far longer than makes sense rather than simply sitting her down for a powwow and fessing up. Smith is a cocky rich kid who spends more time looking cool than solving the case, while Lawrence spends most of the film shouting because he seems to do that best. They work well as partners, but the dynamic between them is just a bit odd. The direction is pure Bay: constant camera spins, explosions, car flips and slow-motion shots designed to make the heroes look as virile as possible. There's very little logic to be found, whether in terms of physics or of how society actually functions, and there are no real consequences for anything, even with the typical angry captain breathing down their necks the entire time. Since this was Bay's first big movie, he seems to have borrowed tropes from the police action films of the 80s and 90s, the Lethal Weapon pictures chief among them, and dialed everything up to 11. In that sense, the film marks a clear passing of the torch, carried by Jerry Bruckheimer, from the low- to medium-budget cop films that came before (Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, Beverly Hills Cop, Red Heat) to the bigger-budget Bay and Bay-adjacent action extravaganzas of the 90s and 2000s (Bad Boys, The Rock, Face/Off, Rush Hour). The villain was pretty meh. I liked Tchéky Karyo well enough in La Femme Nikita, but Hollywood never seemed to know what to do with him (Goldeneye, Kiss of the Dragon), and here he's once again reduced to a generic 90s psycho from Europe, complete with irritating facial expressions and grimaces. In the end, the film boils down to two black men loudly arguing with each other while the city explodes around them and the police department is left with no budget to speak of. Lots of fun to watch, though, if you turn your brain off and munch on some Cheetos.Bad Boys - Leatherheads
Leatherheads plays as an homage to bygone screwball comedy romances, the sort of thing Capra or Hawks might have directed. At least that was the attempt, and I genuinely appreciate the effort, but it doesn't quite get there. Out of the films Clooney has directed himself in, this one seems to me the most self-indulgent. He seems to like himself a lot, here. Maybe I didn't think much of it because it dragged on a little. Maybe there was too much modern innuendo in it. Maybe the speech was a touch too modern, or maybe it's simply that the film had no real purpose. Things just happened. Even the Marx Brothers' football picture Horse Feathers had a point: win the big game, save Huxley College. Leatherheads, by contrast, involves too many disjointed storylines without much grand purpose behind them. Without spoilers, I hated what Zellweger's character does in the film, so much so that afterwards I couldn't care less about her, nor about her romance with Clooney. They both come across as selfish assholes for the final third of the picture. On the other hand, the film has great settings, fantastic costuming, and music that's spot on. The direction is good, too, with Clooney sticking to his signature style: nothing too wild with the camera, the story told from a mid distance throughout. The cast does a good job, with particularly notable work from Krasinski, but competence alone isn't enough to make the film truly stellar. It needed either a great deal more humour to be genuinely fun or a great deal less to work as a "historical" picture, but it lands squarely in the middle with an unassuming plop.Leatherheads
