Rate the last film with your terrible opinions

The Foreigner

It fits into the same kind of category as later day Liam Neeson films. Think Taken etc.

Jackie Chan stars as an unassuming, surly restaurant owner who seeks vengeance after his daughter is killed by a terrorist bomb. Needless to say, despite appearances he has a bar particular set of skills that help him in his quest.

The terrorists in this case are a new breakaway IRA cell. As the film was made in, and set in 2017 it seems a strange choice.

Pierce Brosnan is the NI deputy first minister and former IRA leader who is trying to track down which faction was responsible for the bomb.

I enjoyed it, for the most part. Chan and Brosnan both play against their usual types very well (though if you want to see a charismatic and clownish Chan) you'll be disappointed and their central performances hold it all together, even as things stretch almost to the point of breaking suspension of disbelief.

7/10

Reminds me of watching Ghostwatch. Actually sent me crying to my parents

I'm excited!

He means Alex Wolff but I thought Cage was as good as anything he's done for the last 25 years. It's a great performance.

Which film did his origins before and better?

Pretty much, yeah. It’s better than I expected from the director at least.

Dune’s already got a 5 star review in Empire yesterday. I remember the days when their reviews meant something. Not to say it isn’t great.

Manchester has got 2 IMAX screens. There’s the “proper” one at the Vue in the Printworks snd there the much smaller one at the Trafford Centre. Prefer the Trafford Centre on myself. Yeah, it’s smaller but the seats are a lot more roomy, clearly labelled and it’s much easier to get out/back in should one need to go to the loo.

These things are important. It’s also a great screen too. Just a fair bit smaller.

How much of the movie is subtitled, and are those bits important to the narrative? Wondering how much I’ll miss not being able to read them in the cinema.

Yeah, there's a few subtitles when the cast are speaking whichever chinese flavour they picked.  It's Marvel though, so you'll get the jist of what's happening.

I can see Dune getting 10s from critics and people like us and 4s or 6s from people who think big sci-fi means laser battles and explosions.

And if they don’t go the studio might not fund part 2 which actually has more of that stuff in it

Tenet

I'm late to the party watching this, and I wish I hadn't bothered.

It's just a load of bobbins.

It looks very good, and Washington is a good lead actor, but it's just a very hollow experience.

The exposition is awful and the central concept, that entropy can be inverted to allow certain people and items to travel backwards through the flow of time, doesn't have seem to have a consistent rule set. It's about as logical as the episode of Red Dwarf where they land on a planet where time runs in reverse.

It just feels like a half-baked idea that was greenlight because it's Christopher Nolan's half-baked idea.

The climactic assault is laughable. Two teams make a temporal pincer! Sounds exciting and they all run around shooting guns and taking fire, but there's literally zero enemies seen. Or maybe it's a meta narrative on the expendability of faceless mooks, removing them entirely.

I've seen worse films, but they don't usually have this level of talent applied to making them.

4/10

Dredd

Been meaning to rewatch for awhile and its still excellent. The grounded near-future look has just the right amount of grime and once they’re in the bloc things feel very 2000ad. Playing Dredd as a cold cynical authoritarian rather than a superhero like last time fits so well too. Stallone’s Dredd would never have pushed the button in the Apocalypse War comic but Urban’s version would.

It will always be a baffling and frustrating decision that this was 3d only in cinemas and that it probably did enough damage to kill any chance of a sequel.

10/10

It had a pretty limited 2D release as the distributor for some reason decided it was a 3D tent pole.