Well, if the second John Wick movie was a ballet of destruction, its successor is probably closer to a pantomime, although the whole thing is no less enjoyable for that. The closest you’ll get to restraint in this threequel is the full five minutes it takes for John to get round to killing someone at the top of the film. And in a bout of creativity which embodies the first act, he does this with a library book.
BROKEN Once this seal is broken it’s business as usual however, and the bodies soon begin to pile up alongside the shell-casings and dulled blades. The over-earnest tugging on the audience’s heart-strings as a justification for unbridled murder is toned right down this time (in fact, it basically occurs in those five minutes back there), and this chapter just gets right to what the audience have arrived for: a trigger-happy orgy of righteous vengeance.
CRIMSON It’s all massively self-indulgent of course, but by this point Chad Stahelski has more than earned it. Keanu glides along, right at home in his blood-splattered suit and sardonic demeanour, shining throughout. Likewise, while her screentime is somewhat more limited, Halle Berry steps up to the plate and is every bit as magnificent when it comes to doling out punishment. Not to be outdone, Ian McShane is just as flamboyantly, theatrically and infuriatingly lazy as he was in Hellboy. But we’d expect nothing less.
John Wick 3 is far too long of course, it begins not making too much sense and loses more narrative focus along the way. By the time the third act rolls around you can barely tell who John is fighting now and it matters even less.
And I absolutely loved it.
The first two John Wick movies, obviously. But there's also an air of The Raid to the final act, even if JW3 doesn't have that film's clarity or determination..
It is.
Speaking of such matters, how the hell is this a 15 cert when Beats gets an 18? Yeah alright there are 38 c-bombs in that movie, but it's basically teenagers getting mashed at a rave and being punched by the police. John Wick 3 has headshots. So. Many. Headshots…
It is.
Well, let's not pretend that everything Keanu touches turns to gold. He's been in (and continues to be in), some right old shite. But by the same token, the John Wick movies could easily have been some right old shite with anyone else in the lead. This is a case of the perfect performer in the perfect role..
Unlikely.
I think I heard a low-level one when the goons*1 are sent in to clear out The Bowery King's pad, but I suspect that a Wilhelm in this movie would be loud and proud, so let's side with no.
*1 I mean some run-of-the-mill, henchman-type goons. Not The Goons.
That would have altered the tone of the film somewhat. [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
This review is dedicated to the occupant of seat C4, in screen 9 of Cineworld's Leicester Square cinema, at the 12:15pm showing of The House, on Saturday 8th July 2017*1.
Now, I like to be as punctual as possible with my cinema-viewing. I aim to arrive at the doors of the auditorium itself at the start-time on the ticket, or shortly thereafter pending queues etc. I know there are twenty-seven minutes between that time and the on-screen arrival of the BBFC card (everything thereafter being the film itself). I also know that within those twenty-seven minutes, people will be entering the room on a steady basis and probably, depending on my seat-location, edging past me to get to their own. I'm fine with that (providing it's before the BBFC card), I just don't want to be that guy.
I mention this because I was pretty much on-time, as above, for my viewing of the new Will Ferrell / Amy Poehler comedy, The House. And as I entered the room, seat C4 was already occupied. Fair play, I thought, this is a man after my own heart, a patron who wants to take in the entirety of the presentation*2. Like myself, this was a viewer escaping the bustling activity of London's West End on a Saturday lunchtime and enjoying the group-solitude of cinema. What I'm saying is, this guy clearly wanted to be there as he'd arrived before I had and had bought snacks at the concession counter. Which made it all the more funny when he sat through the adverts, trailers, promo, more ads… and then left the film four and a half minutes in. Such is this man's judgement and foresight, he doesn't need to know what he then missed, he just knew when the script dropped a rape-joke*3 four minutes into the run-time that it's not going to get any better than this.
To be fair, I knew that as well, but I can't review a film after only watching the first scene. If I'm going to objectively hate something, I want all the evidence.
Scripted Joke Interlude #1 EXT. SUBURBAN STREET - DAY.
Middle-aged parents KATE and SCOTT are walking down their drive, explaining to their teenage daughter ALEX that taking drugs in college is a bad idea.
ALEX: But you're always saying how you smoked a lot of pot and peed outside in college?
KATE: Okay, they used to call me 'smoke a lot of pot and pee outside Kate'...
This is the first verbalised joke in THE HOUSE. The conversation moves on after this, the second line was the punchline. It was a joke. This is the bar that the film sets itself. A bar that the film spend the rest of its mercifully-short runtime smashing its own face into, hoping to raise laughs from the audience in lieu of words.
Now, you may be tempted to judge this film by its trailer, and save yourself 85 minutes. You're free to do that, but I assure you that the 2½ minutes of the promo necessitate a tightness of editing and brevity of dialogue that the completed film does not even know is possible. From the initial scene mentioned above, this is a screenplay full of placeholder lines where the jokes should be; where every plot point is explained three times in immediate succession by different characters, then explained again three scenes later. The needless repetition and verbal floundering is a sign of poor ad-libbing and even worse editing. It's only 88 minutes long. Including the credits. Imagine being writer/director Andrew Jay Cohen and not even coming out with enough footage to cross the line of an hour and a half.
This ridiculous mess of a movie is so staggeringly sub-par that even the likes of genre stalwarts Melissa McCarthy and Tina Fey haven't put their names down to appear in cameo roles. Although they could well be in entire plot-strands which have been cut from the movie, so disjointed and erratic is the final product. Ironically, the choreography in the brief fight sequence is executed with an enthusiasm and efficiency that the screenplay writers can barely dream of. Jeremy Renner (yes, the Avenger) turns up in act III as a criminal overlord for some reason, executing the same regretful grimace and decision-making process that led him to appear in a series of British TV adverts for mobile phone contracts. He's no Winston Wolf, that's for sure.
Scripted Joke Interlude #2 INT. 'THE CONTAINER STORE' - DAY.
Middle-aged parents KATE and SCOTT are walking around The Container Store with their teenage daughter ALEX. We know it is The Container Store because there is a sign on the front of their shopping trolley which reads "The Container Store" and also because there are containers of varying sizes on shelves and standalone displays. This is the setup for a joke. Suffering from a severe hangover, KATE reaches onto a nearby display to grab an opaque container. She removes the lid and vomits violently into the box (vomit unseen by audience).
KATE: …it's a good job this is The Container Store and there are containers everywhere.
SCOTT then opens the front of a container about the size of a coffin and jumps in for no reason, tipping it over. The scene ends.
Amongst about a hundred other poorly conceived ideas, the film has a scene featuring a generic US Club-Standup™ playing to an audience of one, who's finding the act absolutely hilarious while observers look on blank-faced at the below-average execution of it all. It's a pretty good allegory for the screening I was in as I only heard one other audience member make any noise of humorous appreciation throughout, and even that wasn't enough to make you think the person was watching 'a comedy film'.
I yearn now for those sweet, heady days when I thought that C.H.i.P.s. would be the worst comedy I'd see this year. On the Hollywood career-ladder, The House is a film you make on the way down. Utter, utter shite.
The cruellest touch might be the the eventual and uncomplicated title card proffering the words "THE END" in massive letters, raising the hopes of the audience like a hostage hearing a police siren outside of the building in which they're being held. This card is immediately followed by a slew of shit out-takes from the film, feeling like the siren tailing off down the street to some other crime-scene. To be fair, at least this is a sign that you can leave the room.
Unless you're the lucky holder of ticket "C4", in which case you need no such permission…
In the dysfunctional family of studio-comedy, this is the inbred sibling of Sisters.
No. Absolutely not.
No. Absolutely not.
Amy Poehler is better than this.
Will Ferrell isn't.
I shall ask you, loudly and in a public space, to explain yourself.
There isn't. There was a one in the VW Golf GTE advert which ran immediately before the film, but a) that doesn't count and b) even if it did, this film doesn't deserve for that to count.
Speaking of before-film activities, while two of the trailers which ran in front of The House ('Geostorm' and 'Rough Night') feature no familiar faces from the GFFA, the others were for Logan Lucky (with Adam 'Kylo Ren' Driver), American Made (with Domhnall 'General Hux' Gleeson) and Detroit (with John 'Finn Boyega). And I only mention this because when you think of the difference in subject and tone between those films, it illustrates that the distributors have no fucking clue who's going to be watching The House.
So anyway it's a Level 2: Amy Poehler's in this, and she was the voice of Joy in that Inside Out, alongside John 'Derlin' Ratzenberger, Frank 'Yoda' Oz, Bill 'BB-8' Hader and Jim 'has done voice-work in eight Lucasarts SW video games' Ward.
Yes. One.
*1 I don't facetiously mean myself here, I was in seat B7. [ BACK ]
*2 It's not like I sit there myself like an eager puppy for just under half-an-hour, gazing in awe at TV adverts shown on a big screen. But I'll use that time to check-in on Facebook/Twitter, and on a day like today prepare something to scribble on as I'll be seeing another film almost immediately afterwards. Plus, I enjoy watching the trailers when I've finished arseing about doing all that (more on those trailers later, though). Those twenty-seven minutes are my get in the zone time. [ BACK ]
*3 And the intended get-out from writers Brendan O'Brien and Andrew Jay Cohen seems to be "oh, it's okay because it occurs during a conversation between two teenage girls, so that's okay", irrespective of how flippant and tasteless it would be coming from any character in this film. [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Whilst being carpet-bombed with products and services for GIRL-THINGS™ for 27 minutes prior to the film, I watched the trailer for The Choice, the upcoming movie based on the Nicholas Sparks novel of the same name. As the promo-reel served not so much as an enticement for the film, but basically the entire thing in a truncated 3-minute form, I found myself thinking "hang on, this looks remarkably like the last trailer for a Nicholas Sparks adaptation I saw. And the one before that. And the one before…" At that moment I realised pretty much exactly how tonight's target-demographic feels when they sit through a trailer for a superhero movie. Just as I wasn't buying the clichéd horseshit about sanding down boats and going for long walks with dogs under emotionally turbulent skies etc, these fine cinemagoers around me don't think "Hey, I like the way they've adapted Iron Man's armour for the new movie; it really evokes the silver-age without being too retro!". Seriously ladies, I can tune out the odd TV and billboard advert that I know isn't aimed at me, but after being force-fed for half an hour the bullshit you're exposed to constantly? I genuinely have no idea how you manage to live in this world full-time. I salute you.
Which is more than Warner Brothers are doing in their cinematic interpretation of How To Be Single, a film which is every bit as patronising and methodical as you'd expect (and, I suspect, as was intended). Recycled chick-flick tropes fill the gaps left by the borderline-incoherent storytelling and erratic editing. Nowhere near as provocative or hedonistic as it'd like to think it is, but thoroughly unable to commit to being contemplative (or even mawkish), either.
At its best, How To Be Single is faintly amusing, if facile and self-indulgent. At its worst, the film is like being waterboarded with Lambrini, your gurgled screams drowned out by a Cosmopolitan-compiled playlist. That the script goes so far as to dismissively reference both Bridget JonesandSex & The City shows just how far above its station the film's ideas are. The cast give good value for money as far as they're able, but they're hobbled by a format which objectifies and belittles them far more than the society it's cocking a snook at. The Insecure one, the Mumsy one, the Needy one and the Fat one*1. You can go out and party as much as you like, girls! As long as you conform while you're doing it. Well played, Warner Brothers, well played.
Oh, and take a good look at that poster. It's the only time you'll see those four actresses in the same room. I'd initially wondered why the IMDB page for the film lists Alison Brie far, far apart from the other stars (in the Rest of cast listed alphabetically section), especially as it's apparently in 'credits-order'. This is because while Brie's character and Dakota Johnson's character share a mutual friend, Alison's story-thread has not-fuck-nothing to do with the rest of the film. It feels like some side-anecdote which the movie keeps forgetting to tell or wasn't edited out properly.
Bizarre, unfocused and every bit as slapdash as the rest of the production...
"Maybe we're been making all the wrong moves? Maybe we've been focusing on the wrong stuff and now it's too late..?" says Johnson's Alice in a third-act moment of realisation.
I imagine the editing-team remarked much the same thing, just before they handed in their final cut of the film…
Being patronised by film studios suggesting your love-life (or lack thereof) is somehow not dramatic enough.
It's not really designed for that format, to be fair.
Well I didn't utterly despise the film, despite its best efforts, so no.
I should hope not.
A little bit.
I mean, probably not a lot.
But yes.
There isn't.
Level 2: Rebel Wilson is due to appear in the upcoming Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie alongside Celia 'Bravo 5' Imrie and Gwendoline 'Phasma' Christie.
*1 I like Rebel Wilson. I want to like her more, I really do. But her ongoing choice of roles is frankly atrocious.
Take a long look in the mirror, Rebel. Or just watch Grimsby. Either/or.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
