1.5 Razors

The Finest Hours

/ / Home Video
  • Title: The Finest Hours
  • IMDb: link

The Finest HoursDespite being based on true events concerning the Coast Guard rescue of SS Pendleton, The Finest Hours feels every bit an exaggerated movie script. Over and over during the film, the small boat under the command of Bernie Webber (Chris Pine) completes such a litany of “impossible” tasks that their actions are actually undercut by the movie’s script. It also doesn’t help that every other person in the movie is a damn fool than other than Bernie or his fiance Meriam (Holliday Grainger) who at one point “teaches” a sailing community to leave their car lights on to help the sailors find the shore.

The script from screenwriters Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, and Eric Johnson also struggles with scale. Until Bernie and his men find the Pendleton we have no comparison between the small rescue boat and the sinking tanker. Even spending much of the film with the crew of the lost ship, a questionable decision which splits the focus of the film, The Finest Hours struggles with even the most basic aspects of storytelling.

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Blindspot – Pilot

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Blindspot – Pilot
  • wiki: link

Blindspot - Pilot

Created by Martin Gero, Blindspot opens with a strong visual that sets up an extremely shaky premise for an ongoing series as an naked amnesiac whose body is covered in tattoos is discovered in the middle of Times Square. Clues from Jane Doe‘s (Jaimie Alexander) tattoos lead to the involvement of Agent Kurt Weller (Sullivan Stapleton) on her case and prevent a terrorist attack in a (rather cheap) stage set of the Statue of Liberty. Just who Jane is, what her connection to Kurt is, and why his name appears so prominently on her largest tattoo are but three unanswered questions the show will no doubt continue to tease audiences with over the course of the season.

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The Scorch Trials

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
  • IMDb: link

Maze Runner: The Scorch TrialsThe sequel to The Maze Runner swaps out a complicated maze for an equally ill-defined desert landscape full of zombies for our surviving heroes to navigate. During a brief rest in a military complex obviously run by the same organization which experimented on them in the maze, Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) and his friends meet a group of kids from other mazes and begin to uncover the truth about why they are so important to WICKED.

While the others are content to be kept prisoner in a safe place with three square meals a day and their own cot, Thomas befriends a boy from another group (Jacob Lofland), and, after discovering the truth about the continued experimentation, helps his friends escape into the barren wastleand outside the facility known as “the Scorch.”

In the same way that The Maze Runner declined to explain how putting kids in a death maze helped make them more valuable to WICKED, screenwriter T.S. Nowlin glosses over how a zombie virus is responsible for turning a major American city into the middle of the Sahara desert.

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Beauty and the Beast – Destined

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Beauty and the Beast – Destined
  • wiki: link

Beauty and the Beast - Destined

Beauty and the Beast closes out its Third Season with the conclusion of the Liam (Jason “Iron Eagle” Gedrick) storyline. With their adversary continuing to put pressure on each member of the group by manipulating the government to take a closer look at the unsolved murders which Vincent (Jay Ryan) played a major role (by, you know, killing them all), Vincent chooses to come clean about everything to the FBI in a last ditch effort to save his friends and take down Liam. And if in doing so he admits to, and gets away with, multiple murders to keep the show going another season that’s just a bonus (wait, so the government knows he’s a murdering super-human with anger issues and doesn’t have a problem with this?).

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Stitchers – Full Stop

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Stitchers – Full Stop
  • wiki: link

Stitchers - Full Stop

Stitchers‘ largely disappointing First Season comes to close with a shooting involving Cameron (Kyle Harris) and Fisher (Damon Dayoub) that will leave the police officer in the ICU and lead the scientist to risk his own life to discover the identity of the shooter. Breaking all the rules of the show by allowing Cameron to temporarily stop his own heart and allow Kirsten (Emma Ishta) to immediately stitch into him to see the shooting (remember how every stitch to this point has taken hours of set-up time?), “Full Stop” confirms the truth about Kirsten’s condition (shown to audiences weeks before) and takes coincidence well past believable levels by linking Kirsten and Cameron all the way back to childhood.

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