Rebecca Ferguson – Page 3 – RazorFine Review

Title: Life
IMDb: link

Life is the exact opposite of Kong: Skull Island. Whereas Kong knew exactly what it was and embraced it, Life is a pretentious wannabe that flails around for far too long before ultimately turning into a cliche and running out of gas long before the credits roll.

Wanting desperately to be a genre-shaking art film which takes the science seriously and has something to say about extraterrestrial life, like the original Alien, instead director Daniel Espinosa‘s (Safe House) movie is a plodding, somber affair with nothing we haven’t seen multiple times before. Very early on, I lost track of number of extended sequences showing off the film’s art design set to ominous classical music. I get it, you guys liked 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unfortunately this isn’t the kind of movie you are making here.

Life is a bottle-show monster flick with a small group of people trapped with a creature they can’t understand let alone defeat. By the time Life gets around to throwing the pretension of actual science out the window and becomes a monster movie there’s little the latest tentacle monster can offer in way of surprise, let alone general horror.

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Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation

Alan Rapp / July 31, 2015 / Movie Reviews

Title: Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
IMDb: link

While Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol and Mission: Imposible III may have more dramatic weight given the personal motivations that drive each film, director Christopher McQuarrie instead focuses solely on delivering an immensely enjoyable summer popcorn flick that feels like an old Bond film (complete with multiple locations around the globe and a swagger the Daniel Craig films lack) mixed with the sensibilities of Ocean’s Eleven. The result may or may not be the best in the franchise, but it is arguably the most fun film the series has produced.

What makes my enjoyment of Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation all the more surprising is I’m not the biggest fan of the plot-framing device McQuarrie chooses to recycle in planting our heroes on the outside of their agency working essentially as rogue agents to save the day for those not smart enough to listen to them (here played by Alec Baldwin). The series tried it once, with Brian De Palma‘s bastardization of the original series, with mixed results. The plot is so common the Bond franchise has used it multiple times (License to Kill, Quantum of Solace, Diamonds Are Forever to name three – none of which would be considered among the series’ best).

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