Baby Driver

image source

As a boy, Baby (Ansel Elgort) was in a car accident that killed both of his parents and left him with permanent tinnitus that he drowns out with music. Baby works as a getaway driver for Doc (Kevin Spacey) whom he owes a debt to. He wants his work with Doc to be temporary, especially after meeting a pretty waitress (Lily James). It doesn’t take long before things go awry. Baby Driver is written and directed by Edgar Wright, and it shows. Almost immediately, you know you are watching an Edgar Wright movie. Ansel Elgort feels like the wild card in this situation. As an actor he doesn’t really much chance to show a lot of range in his movies, and he’s pretty strong here. But, it’s the supporting cast that really gets the chance to shine. Jon Bernthal as Griff is fairly memorable, even though he only gets about five to minutes worth of screen time. Jamie Foxx is absolutely insane as the character Bats, making for a pretty damn entertaining villain character. Jon Hamm and Eiza Gonzalez have awesome chemistry as a bank robbing couple that works regularly with Doc. Much like his work on the Cornetto trilogy and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Edgar shows here that he knows how to combine violence, action, and comedy into one roller coaster package. The soundtrack to this movie is incredible and is perfectly synced up with the action sequences almost all the time. Baby Driver is a movie boasted by it’s fantastic soundtrack, great performances, spectacular writing, and slick directing.

10 / 10               

Transformers: The Last Knight

image source

In Transformers: The Last Knight, Cade Yeager (played by Mark Wahlberg) has become something of a legend. A human military unit called the TRF is hunting all transformers now. Cade searches for autobots, tryng to help them if he can. Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen) has disappeared after the events of Age of Extinction. He finds his creator, the villainous Quintessa (Gemma Chan). She brainwashes him so that he will destroy Earth, which apparently is Unicron. There’s a secret order dedicated to protecting the secrets of the transformers run by Lord Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins) and his transformer butler / assistant Cogman (voiced by Jim Carter). An Oxford profsseor (Laura Haddock) is tied into the whole thing. She is last remaining descendant of the wizard Merlin (Stanley Tucci). A teenage girl (Isabela Moner) who has been living as an orphan in a wasteland Chicago becomes entwined Cade’s life. As you can probably tell just by reading that description, The Last Knight has a lot going on in it. And I haven’t even scratched the surface of this movie’s hundreds of subplots and characters. I enjoyed the hell out of watching this movie, but it is far from “good.” This is mostly because the story almost never makes any damn sense. The action scenes are a little easier to make out here than they were in Age of Extinction. I liked the performances by Mark Wahlberg, Laura Haddock, Isabela Moner, Josh Duhamel, Stanley Tucci, and Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins really stands out to me because it’s Anthony freaking Hopkins. John Turturro shows up in the movie for a little bit, and he doesn’t really add anything to the plot. Jerrod Carmichael just irritated me whenever he showed up, and felt just as useless as Turturro did. At the very least, the rest of the main cast seemed to serve some sort of purpose. Characters seemed to get from one place to another without any explanation. There were characters given some sort of relevance whose name I never even knew when I was watching the movie. Prime barely appears in the movie. The whole TRF thing is a complete retread of Age Extinction. Overall, The Last Knight was enjoyably insane, but also was an incoherent, messily plotted movie. It had good performances, but it had useless and annoying characters. If you’ve never been a fan of the Transformers movies, this isn’t the one that’s going to sway you. But, if you’re like me, and hold this franchise in guilty pleasure regard, then I recommend giving it a watch.

6 / 10

The Mummy

image source

Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) and his buddy Chris Vail (Jake Johnson) accidentally unearth the tomb of Princess Ahmanet, (Sofia Boutella) a woman in line to the Egyptian throne who was hungry for power. Nick teams up with a woman named Jenny (Annabelle Wallis) and Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe) to try and stop Ahmanet. The Mummy doesn’t really feel like its own thing. There’s so much that I felt was a mish-mash of different things from other, better movies. The most blatant one was a clear “homage’ of An American Werewolf in London Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll feels like he’s sort of supposed to be the Nick Fury character. This didn’t bother me. I like Russell Crowe as an actor, and he is one of the movie’s bright spots. That doesn’t mean I don’t see the shades of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in his appearance in this movie. Tom Cruise is an actor I’ve almost always liked as an action star. Here, he’s clearly trying. The problem is that this is just the wrong role for him to be playing. Annabelle Wallis as the character of Jenny has little to offer outside of needing to be saved and acting like an idiot (something her character clearly wasn’t intended to be). She’s better here than she was in Annabelle, but it isn’t enough for me to be impressed by her acting ability. She still offers nothing in the way of charisma, and feels like she’s just kind of there. On the other hand, rising star Sofia Boutella was awesome as the titular mummy. Overall, The Mummy proves to be nothing more than a piece of mediocre wasted potential because I wanted to see a cinematic universe based on the universal movie monsters succeed.

5 / 10      

Megan Leavey

 

image source

Megan Leavey (played by Kate Mara) is a woman whose life is going nowhere. She signs up to join the Marines. While there, she ends up cleaning the cages of the bomb-sniffing dogs and realizes that she wants to be a dog handler, ultimately being paired up with a German Shepherd named Rex. Megan Leavey is based on a true story. What’s crazier to me is that I knew nothing about this woman. I want to start by getting the flaws I had out of the way because they are very few and very minor. At times, I could notice the camera kind of bounce up and down when it probably should have been still. Not everyone is going to pick up on that, and in my case, it really is a nit-pick. The movie can also be kind of cheesy at times as well, though it never really beats you over the head. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about everything else. The acting is pretty damn strong all around. While supporting players Common, Ramon Rodriguez, Tom Felton, and Bradley Whitford all act their asses off, this is Kate Mara’s movie. She completely owns every scene she’s in. The way her character is developed is very well done as well. As the movie goes on, you really get to understand her. You know what she’s doing and why? You can relate to her. I like that they really build up her relationship with Rex. You do feel like there is a bond between them. It’s understandable why she moves Heaven and earth to adopt this dog. There are some moments of humor that work pretty well and add some levity to the movie, especially alongside some of the more intense moments in Iraq. Megan Leavey has minor nit-picks of shortcomings, but a likable lead character and Kate Mara’s performance anchor it.

9 / 10  

Power Rangers

image source

Power Rangers is a reboot of the 1990s television series. Five teenagers are selected (almost through accident) to become the new generation of Power Rangers by a little robot named Alpha-5 (voiced by Bill Hader) and Zordon (Bryan Cranston) to stop the villainous Rita Repulsa (Elizabeth Banks). I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect going into this. I was never really a Power Rangers fan as a kid. For the most part, I like the acting in the movie. The actors playing the Power Rangers themselves actually give really good performances. The chemistry and relationship between these five is actually really solidly built up. They all feel like people you actually could come across in your own high school or on the street. As usual, Bryan Cranston is no slouch. The action sequences are pretty damn cool (even if the slow motion could have been reigned in a touch). The character of Alpha-5 straddles the line between being annoying and being entertaining. He becomes a little more entertaining (largely due to Hader’s charisma). Elizabeth Banks provides a solid enough performance as Rita (though she seems like she’s in a completely different movie when she’s on-screen). The woman just hams up every scene she’s in. The blatant product placement feels forced. A Krispy Kreme store is actually a major plot point in the movie. It did make me hungry for doughnuts, though. So, that’s something. The tonal shifts in this movie are also pretty jarring. It will literally go from a scene with Rita Repulsa murdering someone and stealing their teeth (for reasons never really explained) to the main characters bonding with each other (often spouting jokes while they do so). Overall, Power Rangers has its noticeable flaws, but it’s well acted and, for the most part, has likable characters.

7 / 10