"The Odyssey" - The OG.

Did you know Homer's The Odyssey was originally written as twenty-four books? Maybe you had to read The Odyssey in a class back in school and that factoid just dusted some cobwebs off a decades-old memory. So, you can honestly answer yes, you did know that. But I'm betting you didn't read the whole thing, did you? It's written in a style called dactylic hexameter. If that's even half as obnoxious as iambic pentameter, you probably just vomited in your mouth a little bit when recalling trying to read something in dactylic hexameter. The good news is Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of The Odyssey has translated the story from whatever-meter into good old-fashioned epic blockbuster movie.

Full disclosure, I've never read The Odyssey either. If you're like me, you've heard of at least some of the elements in the story. The Trojan Horse. Odysseus' ten-year voyage home after the end of the Trojan War. Odysseus' wife Penelope and son Telemachus enduring a host of suitors trying to woo Penelope into marriage. The cyclops. The sirens. Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure I knew Odysseus encountered the sirens, but am actually remembering the sirens from Jason and the Argonauts. At least I've got the correct civilization's mythology.

This being a Nolan movie, it shouldn't be surprising to learn that the story isn't presented linearly. Don't worry, there's no time travel or dreams within dreams to melt your brain. Instead of depicting a straight timeline of Odysseus' voyage home and the events that occur during that voyage, we get the highlights in a series of flashbacks. Odysseus (Matt Damon) has been trapped on an island without his crew for seven years and his only company is a sea nymph named Calypso (Charlize Theron). Parallel to that, we jump every so often to Odysseus' palace in Ithaca, where Penelope (Anne Hathaway) has been humoring suitors for nearly two decades. Her now-grown son Telemachus (Tom Holland) is aware that the suitors are looking for any reason to kill him, given he's the heir to the throne. Among the suitors is Antinous (Robert Pattinson), who definitely has murder in his eyes.

The jumping back and forth between Odysseus (and Odysseus' flashbacks) and Penelope/Telemachus does a great job of building tension toward a climax. The drama of the film is in if Odysseus can make it back to Ithaca to reunite with his queen, prevent his son's exile/murder, and resume his place as king of Ithaca. The journey to get there is all of that other stuff. And all of that other stuff is just as exciting and tense to sit through, but for different reasons.

And that's the reason you should watch The Odyssey - the hero's journey. Yeah, that's where the hero's journey came from. Odysseus is THE hero. Practically every fiction movie ever made is based on the hero's journey (even a lot of non-fiction movies use the structure). Same goes for most books. And once you know that, you can't help but map other movies using The Odyssey. One of my favorite examples of this is my wife's breakdown of The Natural. It has a hero, a hero lost for many years, a cyclops, suitors trying to usurp a king, sirens, and more. As I've said in other reviews, my wife is a genius.

The other reason you should watch The Odyssey is...every other film reason that exists. You want great characters and character development? All of the above, plus John Leguizamo (Eumaeus), Lupita Nyong'o (Helen of Troy), Samantha Morton (Circe), Jon Bernthal (Menelaus), Himesh Patel (Eurylochus), Zendaya (Athena), and Elliot Page (Sinon). Do you like great visuals? Nolan blends CGI with practical effects (filming exclusively with IMAX cameras) to perfection. And the way he presents such things as Charybdis, the Cyclops, the Laestrygonians, the Trojan Horse, the underworld, and even Agamemnon (Bennie Safdie) is the sweetest of eye candy. I could go on about the sound, the costumes, the cinematography, the pacing, the everything else that makes this movie so very, very fantastic. But words can't do it full justice. Not even in Greek dactylic hexameter.

Rating: Worth twice the cost of IMAX tickets and you should see it at least twice.

“Violent Night” - Stupid is as stupid does (or Hopper gets a hammer).

All the information you need to decide if Violent Night is worth your money is right there in the movie poster. It’s like Sharknado. Your initial reaction is either “hell no - that sounds stupid” or “hell yeah - that sounds STOO-pid!” Violent Night is all kinds of stupid.

(SPOILERS - Admit it. You’re curious about what I have to say about an obviously ridiculous movie.)

Before you call me an idiot and remind me that Violent Night isn’t meant to win Oscars, I promise you...I saw the movie poster also. I expected nothing more than Santa covered in the blood of his enemies and the film delivers on that front and then some. But, I also expect movies to at least give the bare minimum of effort on basic filmmaking aspects. Things like casting people who might actually win auditions for a middle school play. Or writing a story using complete sentences. Or not outright stealing parts of other movies and bragging about it in the movie. In other words, at least a shred of competence would have been nice.

David Harbour plays Jim Hopper playing Santa. The real Santa. Reindeer, sleigh, Christmas magic...Santa. This Santa is not the holly, jolly Santa of yore, but a cynical, fed-up, drunk Santa begrudgingly stuffing video games and cash into the stockings of the few children who still believe Santa is real. Eventually, this leads him to the Lightstone family compound to leave a present for young Trudy Lightstone (Leah Brady). Upon arriving, Santa helps himself to some very good scotch and a ride in a massage chair, forgetting about the horrid human race for a moment.

Meanwhile, a group of mercenaries posing as caterers kill the security and household staff guarding the compound, take the Lightstones hostage, all in service of breaking into the super-secure vault in the basement and stealing the $300 million in cash stored there the day before. Sound familiar? Don’t worry. Santa will literally name the movie for you during an upcoming fight scene.

The Lightstones consist of matriarch Gertrude (Beverly D’Angelo), her son Jason (Alex Hassell), Jason’s ex-wife Linda (Alexis Louder) and daughter Trudy, Gertrude’s daughter Alva (Edi Patterson), Alva’s husband Morgan (Cam Gigandet), and their son Bertrude (Alexander Elliot). With the exception of Trudy, the rest of the Lightstones do not matter to the plot at all. Just as one example of the family’s pointlessness in the film, the mercenaries cut all of the communications lines to the compound (so no law enforcement will show up), have a computer nerd/safecracker as part of their team, and they’ve bribed Gertrude’s emergency response team, who also happen to have the key to the vault (needed after they crack the combo). So, why don’t the mercenaries just immediately kill the Lightstones? Because John Leguizamo needs to chew up scenery.

Leguizamo plays Scrooge, the leader of the thieves. When I say he is chewing up his scenes, I mean gnashing through them like a toddler with a cake. Every word out of his mouth is either snarled or spit out. Maybe he did it to distract from the fact that every other actor not named Harbour delivered performances that ranged from forgetting how to act (D’Angelo) to never having learned in the first place (everyone else). Maybe he did it because director Tommy Wirkola refused to cast him as Santa. Or maybe he did it because he also saw the movie poster and truly understood the kind of movie this is.

Unfortunately, the writers (Pat Casey and Josh Miller) didn’t get the memo. When they weren’t blatantly plagiarizing Die Hard 2 and Home Alone, they felt the need to blurt out half-baked and no-baked explanations for several things in the film.

Why would we believe Santa can fight trained mercenaries? He’s a thousand-year-old Viking warrior who swings a sledge hammer real good.

How did he become Santa then? Hey, look over there!

Are those same mercenaries really going to fall for Home Alone-style booby traps? How could they not.

Did the mercenaries forget how guns work? Well, we forgot to have them put different colored tape on the magazines, so...

How does Jason move the money from the vault in a single night with nobody noticing and who helped him? Yes.

If Santa can get hurt and dies, does the person who killed him become Santa? Whoa, heavy.

I’d be lying if I said the movie wasn’t decently entertaining from a brainless standpoint. It’s the kind of movie that is only interested in one thing - racking up a kill count for Santa. Nothing else in the film has to be coherent - and most of it isn’t - it just has to satisfy the audience’s blood lust with lots of death and some unique ways of killing people. I’ll give credit where credit is due. It was silly fun watching Hopper-Santa sledgehammer his way through a dozen inept mercs or shove a Christmas tree star through an eyeball and plug it in or shove a grenade down a guy’s pants, walk away, then matter-of-factly state he has to watch and turn around to watch the guy explode. Did I say silly? That word is stupid. Stupid fun.

Rating: Don’t ask for any money back because you saw the poster too.