“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.

“The Fall Guy” - A successful stunt.

Let’s jump right into it...The Fall Guy is an exceptionally fun movie. If you enjoyed Tropic Thunder and Bullet Train, put your hands together. If you didn’t enjoy those movies, well...maybe you just hate fun. The Fall Guy director David Leitch and writer Drew Pearce definitely like fun.

Depending on how old you are, you might remember The Fall Guy television show that ran in the early 1980s. I barely do. I remember that the main character was a stuntman and I remember his truck (mostly because I had the Hot Wheels copy of it). When the theme song started playing in the theater as the movie began, I found myself singing along with it, already starting to have fun.

(Very mild spoilers ahead.)

That stuntman’s name is Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling). On top of his game as the stuntman for A-list action star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), he’s also working with the love of his life on a daily basis, camerawoman Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt). When he suffers a near-fatal accident during filming, he disappears from everyone and his life, including Jody. Eighteen months later, old friend and film producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) tracks Colt down and convinces him to fill in as a stuntman in a movie called Metalstorm, goading him into it on the basis that the film is also Jody’s directorial debut. After wrapping up his first day on set, Gail pulls Colt aside and reveals that Tom Ryder has disappeared and she asks Colt to track him down.

When Gail tells Colt she believes Tom has gotten mixed up with drug dealers, the first question the audience asks is “shouldn’t this be a job for the cops?” In poorly written movies, this question is either completely ignored or answered in a way that makes you roll your eyes so hard your seat reclines. In The Fall Guy, the first question Colt asks Gail is “should you call the cops?” Yay! And the answer from Gail is logical and believable - “if the cops get involved, the studio will find out the movie is way over budget and missing its star and they’ll kill production and you wouldn’t want that to happen to Jody, would you?” Yay!

With that final bit of setup complete, the movie plunges right into why it exists in the first place - action, romance, and comedy in heaping piles of deliciousness. The action was the easy part. The Fall Guy being an ode to practical stunts and stuntmen, Leitch crammed as many practical stunts into the film as he could. Wild car chases, jumps to and from helicopters, fight scenes, shootouts, explosions, people set on fire, even a world-record breaking cannon roll (where an explosion causes a vehicle to roll multiple times). The best thing about the action is it all serves a purpose other than action for action’s sake. Sometimes it’s to move the romance plotline, sometimes it’s for the movie within the movie, and sometimes it’s moving the plot to find Tom forward. For anyone who complains about too much CGI, happy birthday.

The comedy part is just as good as the action. Sometimes, the action is also the comedy. In one scene, Colt is set on fire and blown into a large rock over and over again as Jody expresses her displeasure at Colt abandoning her after his accident. In another, it’s the fake weapons Colt and stunt coordinator/best friend Dan (Winson Duke) must wield to fend off some bad guys. And when the action isn’t providing the comedy, it’s provided by the actors, who are delivering wonderfully likeable and hilarious performances. You’ll be cackling at Taylor-Johnson delivering one of the big, climactic, inspirational, pre-battle speeches in his best exaggerated Matthew McConaughey accent, but not until after you nearly pee yourself during a split-screen scene between Blunt and Gosling. And all of this happens in the context of making fun of blockbuster movie productions, much in the way Tropic Thunder did.

Finally, there’s the romance, which is mostly an extension of the comedy, but elicits real emotions from the audience. While the relationship between Jody and Colt is presented as mostly light-hearted and airy, there are moments that come across as really genuine, even when the film is trying to keep the tone light. Go back to the scene with Colt being all-but tortured by Jody as she confronts his abandonment over and over again. She’s doing this to him in the form of shooting multiple takes of the scene, substituting her own emotions as her movie character’s motivations while directing the scene. Everyone involved in the scene knows what’s going on, even to the point of being supportive of doing the scene over and over again. Blunt portrays real hurt in Jody, Gosling portrays real guilt and sorrow in Colt, all while everyone is trying not to laugh as Colt is slammed aflame into a rock wall over and over. It’s brilliant and, yes, extremely fun to watch.

While there is still a load of movies left to see this year, I have a hard time believing any will be as entertaining as The Fall Guy (yes, I’m well aware Deadpool 3 is one of them). It’s a near perfect blend of great acting, clever writing, amazing stunt work, and just the right amount of self-awareness. I could have done without the forced cameos from Lee Majors and Heather Thomas that felt like an afterthought, but even the best stunt people don’t get everything perfect.

Rating: That much fun is worth double what you paid for it.