“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” - This is the Bad Place.

When asked what I thought of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie after the movie ended, I nodded my head at a five-year old girl exiting the theater and said, “her opinion is the only one that matters.” Five-year olds haven’t yet developed complicated or nuanced views of pop culture, certainly not movies. Their taste in films begins with BRIGHTER!! and ends with LOUDER!! As for me, I thought it was bad. So bad, in fact, that it’s the kind of shirt they torture people with in the Bad Place. I said, shirt. Why can’t I say shirt? Oh, this is the Bad Place.

I’m not going to sugar coat anything here. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is an audio-visual assault of non-stop fan service that will leave you with a migraine at best and brain damage at worst. And when I say fan service, heavy emphasis on service. To paraphrase Star-Lord in Guardians of the Galaxy, if you shine a black light in the theater after this film concludes it will look like a Jackson Pollock painting.

The amount of fan service makes sense when you realize how incredibly lazy the filmmaking was. With the barest semblance of a plot, zero character arcs, and absolutely no development of new or returning characters, it makes sense to try to fill that void with enough easter eggs to clog every toilet in every world. That’s how the Bad Place works.

In fact, there are so many easter eggs they’re not even limited to the world of Super Mario. Fox McCloud (Glen Powell) from the Star Fox games appears as a glorified cameo/supporting character because why the fork not? There’s also a T-Rex for the same reason. Wait, I said fork, not fork. Ugh. Stupid Bad Place.

I would never accuse The Super Mario Bros. Movie of having a great plot, but at least it had one that was coherent. What little plot there is in Galaxy is Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie) kidnaps Princess Peach’s (Anya Taylor-Joy) sister Rosalina (Brie Larson) to suck Rosalina’s stardust power into a weapon that will destroy the universe. And he does this because he’s trying to impress his dad, Bowser (Jack Black). Hey dumbash, you and your dad are part of that universe.

That may sound like a straight-forward plot, but Rosalina is kidnapped in the very first scene of the movie. All Junior has to do is fly to his own private Death Star...I mean Starkiller Base...I mean, weirdo-planet-with-giant-gun-thingy and fire away. But then the movie would be over and we’ve only seen three of the billion easter eggs so far. Instead, the movie goes full ADHD, jumping between random planets to random characters, each with its own meaningless subplot that has no bearing whatsoever on Junior’s evil plan.

You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned Mario (Chris Pratt) or Luigi (Charlie Day) yet. That’s because they are barely supporting characters in this mess. Same goes for Bowser. And Toad (Keegan-Michael Key). Mario and Luigi spent the vast majority of the movie wrangling Yoshi (Donald Glover), a little green dinosaur they found clogging a pipe, while trying to catch up to Peach and Toad. Toad is accompanying Peach because every hero (Peach) needs a sidekick (Toad) for comedic relief. Remember this as the two of them chase an easter egg who stole Toad’s easter-egg-filled backpack through a giant easter egg filled with other easter eggs. It’s funny because they need the easter eggs in the backpack to hire Fox McEasterEgg to fly through the remaining easter egg levels to get to the final easter egg boss.

If this movie has any redeeming qualities, it’s that (1) Jack Black doesn’t get to sing another horrific song at us (“Peaches” from the last film was the worst), and (2) that it’s so transparently geared exclusively toward preschoolers that we don’t have to put up with insulting attempts to pander to other ages. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll still feel cinematically violated by this film, just as you would by a swarm of butthole spiders. That’s how the Bad Place works.

Rating: I don’t care how much your five-year-old enjoys this film; ask for all of your money back.

“Undertone” - Paul is dead.

We all remember times when we were spooked by unknown noises or dark rooms. Maybe you were watching a scary movie late one night by yourself. You heard a sound like a door creaking or maybe you heard a bang from somewhere in the house. You got up and looked around, irrationally nervous about the darkness coming from the stairs, but found nothing amiss. Instead of finishing the movie, you went to bed but had trouble sleeping. Instead of your brain reassuring you that it was just the house settling or the wind knocking something over outside, it fed you ghost stories or intruder fantasies. Brains often have a mind of their own.

In Undertone, a young woman named Evy (Nina Kiri) records a podcast about spooky myths and stories at 3:00 AM while also caring for her dying, catatonic mother upstairs. Evy’s podcast cohost Justin (Adam DiMarco) lives in London, which explains the odd recording time. Except, no it doesn’t. Evy lives on the US eastern coast somewhere, which means there’s only a four- or five-hour time difference, depending on what time of year it is. They could record in the afternoon or on weekends. I’d like to tell you the specific recording time is eventually tied to the demon haunting Evy’s house, but it’s not. It’s just a spooky time to record a podcast.

It might sound like I’m being nitpicky, but the movie goes out of its way to show us the time on the clock multiple times throughout the film. Why draw so much attention to the time if there isn’t going to be even a passing explanation for it? And this isn’t the only example of the film focusing on a detail for no real reason, often causing me to ask - why?

The plot of the film revolves around Evy and Justin listening to a series of audio files anonymously emailed to them. Ten to be precise. The email mentions something about the listener being cursed if they listen to all ten. Their podcast is basically Mythbusters: Salem edition, so of course they decide to listen to them.

The film's horror aspect is almost entirely centered around the "spooky" audio files, which starts out with Mike recording his wife Jessa to prove she talks in her sleep. The files quickly turn into strange sounds in the night, Jessa sleepwalking, the couple hearing a baby crying in the house, Jessa speaking as if possessed by a demon, creepy nursery rhymes playing in the house, and scary sounds over other scary sounds. And if that’s not cliched enough, Justin and Evy hear hidden voices in the sounds and discover messages when parts are slowed down or the nursery rhymes are played backwards. Somewhere, Paul McCartney is shaking his head.

Just like reading from the Book of the Dead or watching a movie about a girl in a well unleashes an evil spirit, listening to these audio files allows the demon of miscarriages into Evy’s home to torment Evy via by possessing her dying mother. You read that right - I said the demon of miscarriages. Make it make sense, I dare you. Yes, Evy is pregnant, but it’s another one of those details that makes you scratch your head at how irrelevant it is. In the audio files, the couple is happy to be pregnant, often talking about it. It makes sense that the demon might go after them. Conversely, when Evy finds out she’s a few weeks pregnant (from a guy we never see and who is mentioned exactly one time), she tells her doctor she's going to "consider all the options" rather than speak to an OB/GYN. Evy is also drinking and taking Lorazepam well before the demon gets involved. Maybe the demon goes after Evy because it’s pissed that Evy is doing the demon’s job for it.

On paper, the film’s premise of scary audio sounds good. The problem is the film constantly undermines the premise. In another example of the film focusing too much on style over substance, every time Evy puts on the headphones for the podcast, the film makes a point audibly cutting off all outside noise. In other words, Evy is wearing extremely good noise-cancelling headphones. Yet, she keeps hearing things in her house while wearing the headphones while listening to the audio files. She’ll hear a noise and quickly look over shoulder, which only makes sense if she saw something out of the corner of her eye. But then that’s not about scary sounds, that’s about scary sights.

The audio files themselves don’t make much sense in context. While we hear lots of spooky stuff on them, the one thing we don’t hear is Mike and Jessa listening to their own set of curse-inducing audio files. So how did the demon get introduced to Mike and Jessa? Is it a new demon that’s tech savvy? Is it an old demon that got bored of standard, random possessions and decided to get creative? And how does Mike and Jessa’s situation relate to Evy and her mother’s situation besides the very tenuous pregnancy link? Oh, and ten files? Really? The most unbelievable part of this entire movie is that Gen Z-ers have the patience to sit through four audio-only files let alone ten. I don’t think the demon thought this one all the way through.

If it sounds like I thought way too hard about many of Undertone’s details, it’s because I was as bored during the film as the demon was. The flow of the movie is all kinds of awkward, preventing it from ever building any real tension or suspense. It’s constantly interrupting the audio listening portion with Evy checking in on her mother every now and then or randomly jumping from day to night to day, never giving us a sense of how much time has passed. Even the listening portions were inconsistent, Evy and Justin listening to the files in random chunks instead of in pre-planned groups. You know - like literally every podcast has ever done.

As the movie neared its climax, I desperately hoped it would have a good pay off. Instead, it gave one of the most confusing reveals I’ve ever seen in a movie. And no, there is no demon reveal. Just a messy house that any poltergeist could lay claim too. And the film didn’t even have the wherewithal to circle back around to incorporating any nursery rhymes in the climax, despite that being another detail heavily focused on early in the film. In the end, it’s a film that wasn’t worth seeing or hearing.

Rating: Listen when I tell you to ask for seventeen dollars back.

"Crime 101" - Cops and robbers.

Crime 101 asks a very important question - what if we made another Steve McQueen (the actor) movie? If you're like me and couldn't pick a Steve McQueen movie out of a lineup because you're under the age when you can collect social security benefits, you don't care about the answer to that question. I'm sure there are film enthusiasts screaming at me right now, but I can't hear you. Would it help if I told you I've never seen a Godfather movie either? Ahhh, there it is.

For the record, I did know that McQueen died decades ago at a relatively young age (I had to look up that that age was fifty). And speaking of dead, my favorite quote from a fellow film critic following the movie was "I thought Nick Nolte was dead." Yes, I was laughing, and I can't say I blame him for thinking that. If you asked me to name a Nick Nolte movie, the most recent I can recall is Blue Chips from 1994. And I've seen a bunch of movies he's been in since Blue Chips. The point is that one of the more memorable parts of a movie should not be that Nick Nolte is still alive.

The other point is I'm not sure styling a movie after an actor who's been dead for almost half a century is a big selling point. That's not me being glib. The film goes out of its way to tell the audience that we’re watching an homage to McQueen (two characters will literally name drop McQueen and two of his movies during one scene); a subtle acknowledgement that writer/director Bart Layton knows the vast majority of the audience couldn't name a McQueen movie, let alone has seen one.

Mike "Steve McQueen" Davis (Chris Hemsworth) is a jewel thief. Mike is extremely meticulous in both the planning and execution of his thefts. He only targets couriers (not stores), never uses violence (just the threat of violence), never leaves any evidence that could lead back to him, and always commits the heists near the 101 freeway in Los Angeles. Detective Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo) has deduced this pattern, but nobody at the precinct believes him, including his partner Detective Tillman (Corey Hawkins). The film begins by showing Mike pulling off a heist, emphasizing all of those details. It's a solid start, but the film gradually buries itself under two hours of half-baked subplots, underdeveloped side characters, and forgotten setups.

By my count, there are at least five different subplots on top of the main plot of heist. There's a romantic subplot, a police corruption subplot, an insurance industry subplot, a workplace misogyny subplot, and a no-honor-among-thieves subplot. Even for a two-hour-and-twenty-minute movie, that's at least one subplot too many, if not three.

That many subplots is why the film features a bunch of underdeveloped characters. The romantic subplot involves a woman named Maya (Monica Barbaro) whom Mike meets after she rear-ends him at a stop light. The film initially develops Mike as a loner, probably OCD, and focused solely on being a thief. Think Ben Affleck’s character in The Accountant, but far less patronizing. Maya’s entire purpose in the film is to show the human side of Mike, but Mike’s aversion to violence already does that. That means Maya is reduced to little more than looking pretty, then making pouty faces and noises when Mike says he has to go away for a while for “work.” If any of the subplots should have been cut, it was this one.

They could have combined the romantic subplot with the insurance subplot featuring Sharon Combs (Halle Berry). Sharon is handling the insurance claim by the jeweler robbed in the opening scene. Simultaneously, she is trying to close an insurance contract with a rich guy (Tate Donovan). On top of that, she is pushing her boss to finally make her partner after years of broken promises from the extremely male board of partners at the firm. That’s three different subplots, so making Sharon the love interest might have been too much. Just kidding, it wouldn’t have been too much with just a couple of tiny tweaks. The real reason they didn’t is because that’s practically the plot of The Thomas Crown Affair and would have been too on-the-nose considering that’s one of the movies Lubesnick name drops.

Similar to the female lead in The Thomas Crown Affair (I did see the Pierce Brosnan remake), Sharon is involved in the climactic heist, though Sharon is actively helping Mike because of that whole misogyny-at-work issue. At least, until she changes her mind. But that doesn’t stop Mike because he planned for the scenario where Sharon might betray him.

Just kidding, Mike doesn’t plan for that. Nor does he bother to keep tabs on the detective tracking him. Nor does he really seem to plan anything in any real detail after that first heist. A meticulous and detail-oriented thief is caught by surprise by multiple things that were practically screaming at him for attention. And that is my biggest frustration with the film.

That entire first heist scene with all of the attention to detail is all setup but the rest of the movie doesn’t pay any of it off. It just puts quasi-random obstacles in Mike’s way, plays duck, duck, goose with the subplots through the entire movie, includes a lengthy car chase scene ala Bullitt, then tries to tie everything up in a nice, neat bow that is one hundred percent predictable and zero percent satisfying. And don’t think I’m spoiling the ending. Mike pulling off the final robbery and driving off into the sunset with an unbelievably forgiving Maya (while Sharon starts her own insurance firm) is just as unsatisfying as Ludesnick foiling the heist and Mike going to jail (while Sharon starts her own insurance firm). But Nick Nolte is still alive, so it’s all good.

Rating: Ask for half your money back and do it in detail.

"Send Help" - Pretty please.

I scheduled two screenings for myself on consecutive nights, something I generally try to avoid. The first was Jason Statham's new film Shelter, which might also be his old film The Mechanic...or A Working Man...or The Beekeeper. It's very hard to tell the difference between most of Statham's films. The second screening was Send Help, director Sam Raimi's new film. I'm not sure why, but I broke my rule about watching previews and watched one for Send Help. My immediate reaction after watching the preview was "Oh, hell yeah." At that moment, I knew it would be a good idea to balance the very predictable Shelter with what appeared to be a bonkers and unpredictable Send Help. The verdict of my decision? Oh, hell yeah.

As it turns out, I'm more of a Raimi fan than I knew. I knew he was responsible for The Evil Dead trilogy, the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. I did not know that he was also responsible for The Quick and the Dead, A Simple Plan, For Love of the Game, and Oz the Great and Powerful. Full disclosure - I didn't like Oz the Great and Powerful (nor did most people) and The Evil Dead movies do nothing for me (they're just too B-movie). And I don't think anybody would disagree that Spider-Man 3 never happened (IT NEVER HAPPENED). But the rest are good, fun, baseball, or all of the above, now including Send Help.

Send Help is a good mashup of a bunch of things Raimi excels at. Quick zoom-ins on characters' faces. Exceptionally well-timed jump scares. Practical effects involving copious amounts of bodily fluids. Great pacing. Excellent music (from frequent collaborator, Danny Elfman). And Bruce Campbell, even if he's only a framed picture on a wall. Add to that a solid story and the two lead actors clearly having a ball in their roles and we get a really, really fun movie.

The story is simple. Two people get stranded on a deserted island after surviving a plane crash and must do what they can to survive. The details make the story so much fun. Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is a strategist, wants to be on Survivor, is good at her job, and is very socially awkward. Newly minted CEO Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) is young, full of himself (he inherited being CEO after his dad died), pampered, and decided to promote his frat bro to vice president over Linda. The reason the preview I watched was so compelling is because it shows this setup, then the expected role reversal. What I wasn’t expecting was how non-cliched that reversal unfolded.

The clever part of the writing is that it is meant to mirror Survivor. True, nobody is voting anybody off the island and there isn’t a host refereeing the action. But Linda and Bradley are definitely competing in various ways and intensity. At first, Bradley still thinks he’s in charge, despite being seriously injured during the crash. Linda quickly educates him (again, this is in the preview) and a situation similar to Misery is definitely on the table.

It’s this dynamic that is so compelling to us in the audience, raising all kinds of tantalizing questions. How far is Linda going to take her newfound power? Is Bradley going to become a sympathetic character while Linda turns into a monster? Or will the story go a completely different direction by having Linda nurse Bradley back to health only to end up his subordinate again? Is anyone going to find them? Will there be a conch involved? Or an anthropomorphized volleyball? Are they really alone on the island and they’ll have to band together to survive? Will anyone hunt a wild boar? Will they end up trying to kill each other? Is there an evil book? The possibilities are endless.

Clearly, I’m trying not to spoil anything for you because that’s how much I appreciated and enjoyed this movie. It’s the kind of movie where you can really see the lessons that Raimi has learned over nearly half a century of filmmaking. How he’s refined his techniques and put the best of them to great use. And how he understands exactly the kind of movie he wanted to make here. In other words, oh hell yeah.

Rating: Don’t ask for any money back. In fact, pay to see it twice.

“Shelter” - In place.

Is Jason Statham really a box office draw? Statham’s latest film Shelter will provide another data point to that question, whose answer seems to be maybe(?). If all you do is look up the box office returns for Statham’s body of work, you’ll get a number somewhere between $1.5 and $2 billion, spread over sixty-three credited acting roles.

But what if he’s not the lead? Nobody can seriously argue that Statham, not Dwayne Johnson or Vin Diesel, is why people paid to see the Fast and Furious movies. Spy was just a weird time where we all got drunk and binged Melissa McCarthy for a while. Definitely not The Expendables, a franchise built exclusively on one last hurrah for 1980s action stars. Or The Italian Job, another years-long drunken bender where we thought Marky Mark Wahlberg might be something. And let’s be honest, people went to The Meg for the title character, not the puny human tasked with hi-yah-ing it. 

Boil it down to just Statham-led movies and the number shrinks way down to the hundreds of millions. 2024’s The Beekeeper looks like his most successful film, pulling in $162.6 million on a $40 million budget. But that’s the world-wide box office. It’s a good box office given that budget, but it’s also low enough to explain why his non-shark, non-co-starring-The-Rock movies still only get modest budgets and tend to open any time outside of when people actually go to movie theaters. If you hear or read that Statham is a bankable action star, they mean bankable January action star.

Statham is also a very specific kind of action star. Remember Liam Neeson’s character in Taken? The guy with special skills that can get things done? That role typecast Neeson and became his character for - if my math is correct - Neeson’s next forty-eight movies. Well, Statham plays that exact same character, but with all of the cheat codes turned on. And Statham has played that character for his entire career; you won’t find a Schindler’s List or a High Spirits or a Love Actually anywhere near Statham’s filmography.

Which brings me back to the movie at hand - Shelter. If you seen a Jason Statham movie, you’ve seen Shelter. He’s always ex-special forces who’s left the service for whatever reason. When an innocent gets wronged or someone needs protecting, Statham’s character is there to protect the innocent and/or kill all the bad guys. If we’re lucky, this might be the movie where an enemy lands a punch or two, but never anything that hinders Statham’s character even the slightest bit.

In Shelter, a corrupt spy chief (Bill Nighy) has programmed a surveillance AI called THEA to flag any ID of former MI-6 black ops assassin Mason (Statham), with orders to kill Mason on sight. At the same time, Mason is saddled with caring for the recently orphaned Jesse (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) whom Mason rescued from the ocean during a storm that killed Jesse’s uncle. The teeny tiny story twist here is Mason is the innocent (so to speak) victim who needs protection. Jesse is just there as a convenient character growth device for Mason (as well as the reason he gets spotted by THEA), as well as a level of difficulty for Mason since she has to be protected during the fight scenes. That’s no big deal though because the cheat codes are still set to maximum.

This is my roundabout way of saying Shelter is a very generic action movie featuring a very generic action guy. There are moments in a handful of other Statham movies where we get a glimpse of something beyond invincible, rogue super soldier. He’s capable of some great banter (Hobbs & Shaw). And we know he’s game for wacky movies (Crank). Maybe if he did more of those, his films wouldn’t feel so repetitive. And if those films’ box offices proved he really could carry larger movies, he wouldn’t have to costar with more bankable stars like Johnson or prehistoric marine life. They’d have to costar with him.

Rating: Ask for fourteen dollars back like you usually do in January.

“28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” - Two become one.

There were three red flags for me going into 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. The first flag is the entire franchise is decidedly mediocre. All three movies to this point have been very forgettable. I’ve already forgotten the third one despite the fact that I watched it less than a month ago. The second flag is that The Bone Temple is the fourth movie in the franchise. Each of the first three movies has essentially the same plot - don’t get eaten by zombies. Why would we expect anything different in The Bone Temple? The third flag is The Bone Temple got a mid-January opening. Woof.

It would be an understatement to say I was pleasantly surprised by how good was The Bone Temple. The truth is I was almost in awe. I just wish it hadn’t taken writer Alex Garland three sequels to realize the zombies were only the story in the first movie of the franchise.

The Bone Temple is a direct sequel to 28 Years Later (both movies were filmed together), but it’s also a companion piece. The Bone Temple features two completely separate story arcs that eventually converge with each other. One features the continued adventures of young Spike (Alfie Williams) after he strikes back out into the quarantine zone at the end of the previous film. The other features Dr. Ian Kelson, the doctor Spike seeks out in the previous film in the hopes his sick mother can be cured. By themselves, each story is interesting, but not enough to carry an entire movie. But put them together and, oh man have you really got something good.

On one side of the movie, young Spike has found himself trapped in a small satanist group led by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell). The group represents the de-evolution of man in almost every way possible. They have stopped thinking for themselves, completely subservient to Jimmy Crystal. They have no home, roaming the land and taking what they want through violence and killing. They even fight amongst themselves on occasion, culling the weakest from the group whenever they happen upon a new non-zombie person who might prove useful. Spike is terrified, but nearly helpless to extricate himself due to him still being a small human adolescent.

On the other side of the movie, Kelson has taken a scientific and medical interest in an alpha zombie he’s named Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry). Samson represents the evolution of man. Using blow darts tipped with a healthy dose of morphine, Kelson has discovered that he can sedate Samson to the point that Samson won’t try to rip Kelson’s skull and spine from his body. Kelson has also discovered that while Samson is sedated, Samson is responsive to things like music, dancing, and conversation. Kelson’s theory is that the rage virus suppresses brain function instead of just killing it (among other things) and the morphine is able to counteract that suppression to a certain degree. Make no mistake, Kelson isn’t trying to cure the virus, just understand it a bit better. More importantly, the entire experiment is returning some of Samson’s humanity.

As you can see, these two storylines perfectly compliment each other. Given that, it makes perfect sense that they would crash into each other, raising a final question - which version of humanity will persevere?

There are a couple of things that make the movie so compelling, beyond those two storylines. One is spending real time exploring the virus itself. Most zombie films don’t bother with this because that’s not the point. Just like the first film in this franchise (28 Days Later), the point is survival of the remaining non-zombified humans. But dissecting how the virus works allows The Bone Temple to explore some of what makes us human.

The second is focusing on how humans behave decades after the initial fall of civilization. The Walking Dead does this really well, even though it can’t quite get out of its own way with the zombies. In The Bone Temple, the zombies are part of the environment, even Samson. Instead of being an existential threat that is always run from, they are something to be studied and understood. Even The Walking Dead never goes that far (if it did, it was after I grew bored of the show and quit watching).

The last thing is a scene that is (already) known as “The Iron Maiden Scene.” I’m not going to tell you anything about this scene other than it’s simply amazing. The last time I saw a scene as good was in season four of Game of Thrones when Tyrion Lannister rips into everyone after being accused of murdering Joffrey. The Iron Maiden Scene is the only time I can remember the entire theater audience bursting into applause after a scene that didn’t involve a climactic battle or a villain getting their just desserts or the movie ending. And that applause happened again at the end. The movie really was that good.

Rating: Don’t ask for any of your money back in January for the first time ever.