1.5 Razors

Allied

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Allied
  • IMDb: link

AlliedThere’s so much wrong with Allied it’s hard to know where to start. At times director Robert Zemeckis‘ film is laughably, occasionally excruciatingly, bad. In its best moments Allied is ill-conceived, and it doesn’t have many of those.

Who thought it was good idea to set a WWII movie in Casablanca? The script by Steven Knight (Burnt, Seventh Son, Eastern Promises) plays like a bad romance novel mashed-up with a hollow spy thriller. The result might make for an okay trashy vacation read on the beach but fails spectacularly on film.

Reminding you immediately of Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Casablanca, spies Max Vatan (Brad Pitt) and Marianne Beauséjour (Marion Cotillard) meet in Casablanca. Assigned by their respective countries to work together to kill a high-ranking Nazi officer, the pair play husband and wife while falling into causal sex which I guess is supposed to look like love on film. (It doesn’t.) In a move that seems completely out of the blue, after completing their mission, Max invites Marianne to return to England with him and be his wife. And life is good, for awhile, until Max discovers that his wife may be a German spy.

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Inferno

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Inferno
  • IMDb: link

InfernoWith each successive entry, the film series based on the Robert Langdon novels of Dan Brown becomes less and less watchable. At this rate the fourth movie may actually make audience bleed out of their eyes. Opening with an incomprehensible first 10 minutes filled with hellish images floating through an injured Langdon’s (Tom Hanks) mind, the film attempts to up the ante by forcing the professor not only to solve riddles and clues to find the truth but this time to do so with amnesia. Along for the ride is his latest attractive European brunette co-star, this time a genius doctor (Felicity Jones) with a love of puzzles (of course) who helps Langdon escape a hospital in Florence when the men who kidnapped him attempt to reacquire the college professor to find a deadly virus.

Rather than unraveling the mysteries of the Holy Grail or delving into a Papal conspiracy, this time Langdon is set after a man-made plague known as Inferno. Created by a billionaire (Ben Foster) obsessed with purging the world of its excess populace, the madman of course left near-indecipherable clues that would make it nearly impossible to see his plan carried out.

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Batman: The Killing Joke

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Batman: The Killing Joke
  • IMDb: link

Batman: The Killing JokeA stand-alone one-shot written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Brian Bolland, Batman: The Killing Joke is the most overrated Batman story ever printed. Very much a product of its time, the story features the Joker (Mark Hamill) finally going “too far.” I’m not saying the story is bad, in fact it works in the way Moore and Bolland intended and explores the destructive relationship between Batman (Kevin Conroy) and the Joker in unexpected ways. However, it also make several decisions which are hard to excuse even nearly three decades later – predominantly turning Barbara Gordon (Tara Strong) into nothing more than a victim.

Given it’s gruesome subject matter in which Commissioner Gordon‘s (Ray Wise) daughter is paralyzed in front of him before being forced to relive the moment over and over in the Joker’s carnival of horrors, the 48-page story (including many panels without any dialogue) seems an odd choice to stretch into a feature.

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Blindspot – The Complete First Season

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Blindspot – Season One
  • wiki: link

Blindspot - The Complete First SeasonBurdened with a bizarre premise, Blindspot is a show that just never quite clicked for me. Opening with an amnesiac woman covered in tattoo clues to crimes which may or may not have happened yet who was found and taken in by the FBI, the First Season followed Jane Doe (Jaimie Alexander) and her FBI best bud Agent Kurt Weller (Sullivan Stapleton) to solve crimes by the timely deciphering of her tattoos all the while Weller is convinced Jane is a missing friend from his childhood (despite being told medically she couldn’t possibly be Taylor Shaw early in the season).

Devolving into conspiracy, Weller’s dysfunctional relationships, betrayal, and secrets the show’s writers have no intention of revealing anytime soon, Blindspot floundered through such an unremarkable First Season I’m actually surprised the show got picked up for a sophomore season. Collected on DVD and Blu-ray, extras include commentary for the Pilot, deleted scenes, and eight featurettes on the show, the cast, the tattoos, and more.

[Warner Home Video, Blu-ray $54.97 / DVD $49.99]

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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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