“Mufasa: The Lion King” - Nothing to sing home about.

As the year draws to a close, we’re left with the annual end of year fireworks in the form of Christmas movie releases. One last splurge of films to goose box office receipts before the calendar flips over to the graveyard of films that is January. While Wicked and Moana 2 continue their strong runs, they’ll have company from a Bob Dylan biopic, a Dracula remake, Sonic the Hedgehog’s third (!) film, probably not Kraven the Hunter (grossing a paltry $11M in its opening weekend just a few days ago), and a Lion King prequel called Mufasa: The Lion King.

My very first question about Mufasa: The Lion King is not what you think it is - who asked for this? No, my first question is why the subtitle The Lion King? As this movie tells us, as well as The Lion King did, Mufasa means “king.” So, the movie is called King: The Lion King. Also, Simba is the lion king. This is already confusing.

Mufasa begins with Pumbaa and Timon babysitting Simba’s daughter Kiara while Simba runs off to find Nala, who is giving birth to another lion cub. Wait, this is a sequel and a prequel? Also, why isn’t Nala birthing her cub in their home? Some of that confusion is allayed, then replaced with other confusion, when Rafiki shows up and launches into the story of how a lowly, common lion named Mufasa became king. Yes, a lion whose name literally means king and whose son we were told came from a long line of kings by Mufasa himself isn’t actually of royal blood. Well, this sounds promising. What next - that Scar isn’t really Simba’s uncle?

Turns out, Scar isn’t really Simba’s uncle. Nor is his name Scar. For the first half of the film, I thought his name was Tucker because he and his family all have British accents. Scar’s real name is Taka and Mufasa is Taka’s brother in spirit only. The two lions meet after Mufasa is swept away from his home and family by a flood and later found floating in a river. Mufasa is adopted by Taka’s mother Eshe and trained as a hunter with the lionesses at Taka’s father Obasi’s insistence. After a pride of white lions attack and kill Taka’s entire pride, Taka and Mufasa spend the rest of the film fleeing from the white lions, hoping to find refuge in a mythical land called Malele.

This being a prequel, almost nothing that follows is surprising. Even if you have never seen The Lion King, or the other The Lion King, you know Mufasa prevails because Rafiki is relaying this story to Mufasa’s grandchild in the future. But you have seen at least one The Lion King, so you will probably spend much of the time wondering when the movie is going to show us how Scar gets his scar and becomes Scar. You also know that prequels can’t resist showing you the origins of stuff from the original movie, so it’s a foregone conclusion that Sarabi, Zazu, and Rafiki will show up in this story. And Pride Rock. And how Rafiki got his staff. And Scar and Mufasa having a falling out. And Scar digging his claws into Mufasa’s paws as Mufasa dangles from a ledge. The only thing missing is how Scar’s mane turned black.

So, here’s how Scar’s mane turned black. Just kidding. That’s a story for Rafiki to tell in Mufasa 2: Yet Another Lion King Movie. But my son had a different question that needs answering - where is the snowy mountain range in Africa that Mufasa and Taka traverse? This is what happens when a movie seems so determined to be meh that it can’t keep the attention of a 12-year-old...who watches tennis on TV. Because I was also quite bored, my thought upon seeing the mountains was - isn’t that where Gandalf fought the Balrog?

(For the record, the Atlas Mountains in northern Africa do indeed feature snow-capped peaks. You’re welcome.)

Surprisingly, it wasn’t just the story that was decidedly mediocre. Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the songs and none of them stood out. A couple songs were almost bad, most notably Mads Mikkelsen (voicing the white lion pride leader, Kiros) singing “Bye Bye,” an awkward song about murder, and Mufasa (Aaron Pierre) and Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) singing “I Always Wanted a Brother,” an awkward song that wasn’t about murder.

Unsurprisingly, Mufasa delivered what I expected it to deliver. A vanilla story filled with fan service and not an ounce of tension. A movie that is somehow confusing and not confusing at all. A film so very blah that you won’t remember the music and might not even remember which lion is which, following in a long line of very blah live-action Disney remakes. What next - a Lilo and Stitch live-action remake?

Rating: Ask for two thirds of your money back because it’s not the worst movie you can see this Christmas.

“Kraven the Hunter” - Don’t forget to wipe.

It was less than two months ago when, in my review of Venom: The Last Dance, I advised the folks at Sony to keep their celebratory Sony Spider-Man Universe (SSU) champagne on ice. While The Last Dance managed to turn a decent profit (somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million), box office predictions for the next SSU movie - Kraven: The Hunter - are, to put it gently, ugly (analysts are guessing a paltry $20-$25 million opening weekend). The good news is Sony can pop that champagne now, not because the SSU has been a success, but because Kraven is officially the last SSU movie. Or as I like to call it - the final death throes of a franchise that has been nothing but death throes.

Of the six movies in the SSU, Kraven is only the second one I didn’t hate. That doesn’t mean I liked it, but it also didn’t make me want to start throwing things at the screen. And to be clear, Kraven isn’t a good movie...unless we’re defining “good” as “not toilet water.” Yes, that’s a really low bar, but I’m not the one that set the bar at “can we make a worse franchise than the DCEU?” That’s the natural consequence of making a Spider-Man franchise sans Spider-Man.

Like the rest of the SSU main characters (except Madame Web), Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a villain retconned as an anti-hero. What that means is he kills people, but only the bad ones. The film opens in pretty standard superhero origin story fashion. In this case, Kraven infiltrating a prison in order to kill a bad guy. In this opening action sequence, we get a taste of Kraven’s lion powers. You read that right - lion powers. As in roar and king of the jungle. Yes, it’s as silly as it sounds. Think Captain America, but dressed like Crocodile Dundee.

As Kraven will tell us multiple times throughout the film, he’s the best hunter in the world. Several people will ask Kraven “how did you find me?” and he will respond with “I’m the best hunter in the world.” So, you will laugh and roll your eyes as hard as I did when Kraven seeks out high-powered attorney Calypso (Ariana DeBose) because “you can find people I can’t.” HAHAHAHA. *Hard eye-roll…ouch, too hard*

There are two actual villains in the film. One is Kraven’s father Nikolai (Russell Crowe), a ruthless Russian mobster operating out of London, and the other is Rhino (Alessandro Nivola) a ruthless Russian mobster operating out of London and trying to move in on Nikolai’s turf. While Nikolai is just a regular human, Rhino gained the power to turn into a rhino-man from a mysterious doctor in New York. Think Incredible Hulk, but dressed like a rhinoceros wearing pants. You read that right - pants.

The, erm, plot is what I just told you. Where Kraven fits in is he’s the best hunter in the world. You know - like a lion. And he really cares about animals. I think. It’s kind of hard to tell, actually. I was distracted by everyone at our screening laughing when Calypso pulled a deck of lovingly wrapped tarot cards out of her purse at a funeral, explaining to Kraven “they were my grandmother’s and I always carrying them with me.” And I’ll be damned if she didn’t NOT do a tarot card reading for Kraven right then and there. Huge miss, director J.C. Chandor, huge miss.

The point is Kraven is the best hunter in the world. As the field of mobsters are whittled down, Kraven is both hunter and hunted, culminating in the inevitable showdown with Rhino. Along the way, Calypso and Kraven’s brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) occasionally need rescuing. That’s the whole movie. And did I mention Kraven is the best hunter in the world?

I really can’t explain why I didn’t hate this movie. It’s really not a good movie and easily as lazy and terribly put together as the rest of the SSU. I think the best explanation is it doesn’t feature a Dakota Johnson proving once and for all that she really is the worst acting nepo-baby in Hollywood. That it doesn’t feature a Jarod Leto taking the movie far too seriously. That half its run-time isn’t Tom Hardy arguing with himself two and a half movies after it stopped being amusing.

What it does feature is Crowe and Nivola expertly chewing up scenery with hilariously exaggerated Russian accents. It does feature a DeBose visibly confused because she has no idea what do with a character who got less development than her deck of tarot cards. It does feature some surprisingly decent action scenes and some unintentionally funny animal scenes. And it does feature Taylor-Johnson showing off his shredded physique, parkour skills, and just the right amount of dedication to a character, movie, and franchise that is decidedly not Spider-Man. That sound you’re hearing is someone finally flushing the toilet that is the SSU.

Rating: Ask for all your money back so you can see the other lion movie (Mufasa) opening this month.

“Nosferatu” - Let bygones be bygones.

Movie theaters are not the best places to take a nap. There is a screen with bright light reflecting off it, loud noises often emanating from all around the room, and other people around you. On the flip side, it is a dark room, with very comfortable temperatures, and, in some theaters, plush seats that recline and heat up. For me to doze off during a movie in a theater, I usually have to be really tired or the movie has to be incredibly boring or uninteresting. While I didn’t fall completely asleep during Nosferatu, I threatened it many times.

That’s not to say Nosferatu is a truly boring movie. It has plague rats, jump scares, a damsel in distress, a creepy vampire, and Willem Dafoe. On paper, that’s the opposite of boring. Yet I found myself fighting to keep my eyes open at multiple times. And I wasn’t that tired from a normal day at work.

I think the main problem for me is Nosferatu is a throwback film to a very bygone era that I’m not interested in revisiting. The original Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was a German silent film appearing in 1922. That’s not a typo. Today’s Nosferatu is a remake of a literal one hundred-year-old movie. And the remake isn’t a reimagining so much as it’s a straight remake, just with that newfangled sound technology to capture actors actually speaking. Or screaming. There’s a quite a lot of screaming.

I’m not exaggerating when I say this new Nosferatu feels like it was made one hundred years ago. Many of the film techniques - like straight shadows of hands and silhouettes to elicit terror - are reused to great extent. Much of the film is either straight black-and-white or using filters that wash the color out so much it might as well be black-and-white. And so much of the movie is shot in near darkness. Look - I get it. Not being able to see what’s happening induces fright, but for me it also induces heavy eyelids.

The other problem is the story is missing an element to tie everything together. The vast majority of the original film’s story (stolen from Bram Stoker’s Dracula) stays intact. Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) and Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) Hutter are recently married and trying to build a life together. Thomas is sent to Transylvania to assist Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) in closing on some property in the German town Wisborg where the Hutter’s live. As a younger girl, Ellen had been stalked by Orlok and Orlok’s goal in moving is to take full possession of her. While Thomas is away, Orlok is able to haunt Ellen’s dreams again, causing strife with Friedrich and Anna Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin), the Hutters’ friends who agreed to house Ellen while Thomas is away.

The story continues with Thomas’ harrowing escape from Orlok’s castle, Orlok’s voyage on a ship to Germany where the entire crew dies and the ship wrecks in Wisborg’s port, and Thomas enlisting the help of Dr. Siever (Ralph Ineson), Friedrich, and Professor von Franz (Dafoe) to hunt down and kill Orlok. What’s missing from the original story in this remake is Ellen never discovers a book on vampires (one that Thomas originally finds in Orlok’s castle) that informs her how to rid the town of Orlok. This is a key thread through the original story because it provides discovery for both Thomas and Ellen and becomes the reasoning behind their actions. In the remake, von Franz exposits all vampire knowledge to the other men, but never to Ellen, so Ellen has zero agency through the entire film. Like how Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark has no bearing on the fate of the Nazis, we could remove all of the non-vampire men from Nosferatu and the story would still end the same way - with Ellen and Orlok’s final consummation. The difference is Ellen is an unwilling participant this time around and that’s pretty boring.

I want to stress that Nosferatu is not a bad movie. I can appreciate how much effort went into it to capture the feel of a one-hundred-year-old movie. I enjoyed the performances from the actors, particularly Dafoe and the always amazingly terrifying Skarsgard. I could have done without the bombastic sound threatening to split my skull at times, but I get why it was done that way. It’s just none of those things were enough for my interest to sink its teeth into and keep my eyelids from having a mind of their own.

Rating: Ask for five dollars back in today’s money.