Tag: 1 out of 4

I have still never seen the UFC themed movie Never Back Down. I barely even know it exists.

But I did watch the sequel, Never Back Down 2: The Beatdown. When I rented it from Blockbuster (old movie alert), I didn’t see the 2 on the title, just saw that Michael Jai White was involved (and it was his first time directing!) and decided to give it a shot. I don’t think I needed to see the first film to get it, so all was well.

And now, years later, we have Never Back Down: No Surrender, the third awaited Never Back Down film. This one is starring and directed again by Michael Jai White, only his second time at the head of a movie.

And again, that is why I am watching this movie. White makes me excited, what can I say?

Has Michael Jai White ever turned down a role that lets him take his shirt off? I think not.

The third film takes place some amount of time after the last film, and things are different now. I think. Case Walker (Michael Jai White) is thinking about getting back into the ring and slumming it out on his own. But that is ridiculous, he is a great fighter and shouldn’t be worried about minor scuffles.

He runs into an old friend, Brody James (Josh Barnett), who is an elite fighter as well and Brody convinces Case to join with his gym and get back into the big ring. So he does sure, no pressure.

Speaking of pressure, they decide to go to Thailand to train and fight. The PFC is holding their big match there in a month or so, James vs Caesar Braga (Nathan Jones), a scary looking man with anger issues and a criminal record. Of course! The whole thing is being promoted by the legendary Hugo Vega (Esai Morales), who cares only about profits. Hell, they even allow performance enhancing drugs in their league, no judgement.

And of course, Case is just there to help James train. He doesn’t care about getting on the ticket. But when people find out he is there, he gets popular again. They hear about how great of a fighter he still is. He gets a viral video. So things begin to happen to get him on in the ring as well, no matter who gets hurt along the way.

Also featuring Gillian White as our necessary love interest/publicist, Stephen Quadros as a trainer, Amarin Cholvibul, Dan Renalds, and JeeJa Yanin as lesser fighters in the gym, and Sahajak Boonthanakit as the only press person to talk.

That dude is like a head taller than the other dude. That is a head worth of ‘roids.

Never Back Down: No Surrender is not going to win any awards. It won’t be nominated for awards either, unless there are UFC film awards, because I don’t know how many of those come out in a year. This film is not the amazing, wonderful, tear inducing, Warrior. No, this is the third film in a straight to DVD UFC series.

So by its own standards, it is just going for some entertainment, with some decent fights. The fights are decent, and the entertainment is also light. That’s right, just light entertainment.

If the movie was less serious or more comedic, then I probably would have thought it was okay. The way our main character got out of a serious conundrum by the end was pretty smart, but still feels disingenuous at the same time. Our hero was against the fight he was forced to take and didn’t want to do it. But he ends up still doing it, just in a weird way. It gives the film a final fight that they advertise on the cover and poster, but in reality, it shouldn’t have happened at all.

I can honestly say I don’t remember a lot about the last movie. But I remember smiling more and thinking it was at least fun. This one was just mostly awkward, with some bad acting and an occasional decent to watch fight.

I love period piece films as long as that period isn’t Victorian-era England. Those ones aren’t necessary bad, they just feel overdone to me and now I have developed a slight bias against them. Sorry, not sorry.

Civil War era films usually get me all excited though. Or just pre-Civil War slavery films. I don’t even need them to be based on real events, which is the recent trend. Just give me a movie with brothers killing brothers and morals on the line. I wanna tear up at the hardships of war and get mad at something that happened 150+ years ago.

So the Free State of Jones is based on real events? Cool, whatever. I accidentally saw a trailer a few months ago before another screening and it looked pretty interesting. I know it was originally supposed to come out in March but got pushed back to Summer for reasons. Doesn’t matter, still excited to watch it.

“Oh, sup prof. Just chillin'”

In October, 1862, Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), up for the sweetest name award, was also serving in the Confederate Army. For whatever reason he was given nurse duty, so he used that status to save his friends from the battlefield and getting them to doctors quickly. Then his son, Daniel (Jacob Lofland) appears, saying that their farm animals were taken and crops to feed the army. Newt agrees to escape with his son and take him home, but tragedy occurs and Newt is forced to just bring home a body.

Newton came from a small farm in Jones Count, Mississippi. He has been poor and kind of pissed off at the rich. Pissed that their sons don’t have to fight in the war, when he feels the entire war is them fighting for slaves that only the rich have. So he decides to stay home with his wife (Keri Russell) and young boy. He becomes a protector of all the homes in the area from Confederate troops looking to take more than the 10% allowed.

They quickly turn on him and he has to go into hiding in the swamp. There he joins a camp with Moses (Mahershala Ali) and four other runaway slaves. They hide together, work together, and eventually get guns to protect themselves. Overtime, more and more Confederate deserters are on the run and end up at this camp until they have over 100 members. Newt has developed a relation with a House slave Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who has been secretly helping their group.

Anyways, short story long, they eventually set out to take their land back from the Confederate soldiers that are trying to take their crops and resources. They get three counties to their name before resistance starts and decide to start their own Nation, a Free State of Jones, to like, grow their own crops and have equality and all. Fun times.

Donald Watkins and Troy Hogan play two other slaves, Bill Tangradi and Thomas Francis Murphy play our confederate leaders trying to stop this group, and a whole lot of other white people, played by Sean Bridgers, Joe Chrest, Brian Lee Franklin, Kerry Cahill, and Christopher Berry.

The way to prevent your stuff from getting stolen is to burn it all down.

Never before in a movie have I seen a drop in quality so much as Free State of Jones. At the beginning we are dropped right in the middle of a random Civil War fight. It showed that the Civil War was brutal, people died and marched on and died some more. Newt escapes, quite easily apparently and continues to be mad at the rich for not fighting their own fights and his friends losing their livliehoods over it. Sure, makes sense. Newt doesn’t care about Slave rights or anything, he has none. It isn’t until a Slave helps save his sick son.

But even then, it is extremely awkward in this movie, even when he is living with just runaways. They never get close. When it is a giant army of Confederates and the few slaves, people are still dicks to slaves. It isn’t until one of the more cringey movie moments that I have ever seen that things start to change. When Newt’s character gives a speech about how basically everyone there is someone’s slave, no matter the color and they shouldn’t be jerks. He used a bit more “colorful” language, but that speech helped change everyone’s mind, albeit temporarily, to work together towards a goal.

In terms of modern comparisons, it reminded me of the All Lives Matter backlash to Black Lives Matter. This movie argues that the poor southern farmers were treated just as bad as slaves, but then goes on to show that technically the slaves still have it worse. I don’t know if the Moses character is real at all, but they put all of the slavery baggage on him, as the other members of the camp apparently don’t have lines and I barely heard two of their names mentioned. It was such a shit way of trying to get us emotionally invested in the slavery story, when they only put personality in him and Rachel. We also find out he has a wife and kid somewhere in “Texas” (again, we are in Mississippi), yet they are able to reconnect extremely easy post war with zero explanation as to how.

This kid is killed off in the first 10 minutes and gets more promo pictures than other people in teh film.

There are more problems with this movie outside of making it super white focused. I can’t remember when, but early on in the movie, we get a title card that says 85 YEARS LATER… and we are shown a court room setting where the whiteness of a person is being put on trial, because his great grandmother might have been Rachel, making him part black, and thus his marriage illegal. This was a real trial and actually true, but HOLY CRAP, this has no reason to be in this movie at all.

The “future” scenes do nothing for the rest of the film and they keep coming back, breaking up the plot and slowing it even more down. Whoever decided to add this constantly interrupting subplot/finale to the film should be fired from whatever future film jobs they have, because it was such a poor choice.

The Confederate “bad guys” and post War bad dude are basically cartoon villains, just missing some finger twirling of their mustaches. The film is especially insulting over the “peanut scenes” in the last twenty minutes.

Oh, and guess what. The film doesn’t end with the end of their rebellion or the end of the civil war. It goes over another year or so after the fact, during early KKK period and reconstruction. Why? Because they feel like it. Because the ending drags on and on, for over thirty minutes. The filmmakers had no idea how to end this film and practically none of it matter for the overall story they were trying to tell.

Fuck, Free State of Jones. I can’t believe it ended up being so blah. There were good moments in there and with 45 or so less minutes, plus more character development for some other characters, and this would have been fantastic. This film makes me less excited for The Birth of a Nation, which is stupid, I know.

I’m not angry at your Free State of Jones. I’m just really disappointed.

Oh sorry, here is an extra picture. It is really hard to find any of Moses or Rachel, let alone any of the other black characters in the film. This is basically the best I can do (without huge watermarks), even by googling the movie title with actor names. Shit, if you google the movie and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, the main love interest, you will find barely anything from the actual film and some pictures of her from Belle.

The director was Gary Ross, an old white guy who has only directed a handful of films. His first one was Pleasantville, which I love and adore, but I guess it makes sense. In that movie, he told the problem of Racism in America using only white people. In Free State of Jones, he basically just does that again, but in a more insulting way.

Benghazi. What a political buzz word. A city that no one had any idea even existed before the events in 2012, but it became quite a big deal.

And I couldn’t care less. I am mostly annoyed that it has become such a buzz word without a lot of meaning behind it that shitty internet and news people are referring to controversies as “word”-ghazi, depending on the situation. It is just as ludicrous as adding gate to the end of it, if not more so. And both things need to stop.

Yes, these indeed are my thoughts going into the movie 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. I don’t know shit about it, outside of the fact that controversy exists. I know it is supposed to be a real story, but Michael Bay is directing it so who knows. I know that this movie is based on a book written by someone who was there, so who knows the actual accuracy of the book.

After all, who cares about truth when the outcome is income.

I expect a plethora of pew pew pews on both sides.

Apparently, Benghazi, Libya was named one of the most dangerous places in the world. Despite that, the US still kept a “diplomatic compound” in the city and nearby is a “secret” CIA compound staffed by private military contractors. And the movie begins with Jack Silva (John Krasinski) flying in to join their team. “Rone” Woods (James Badge Dale) an old friend picks them up, tells him to not mess with the locals and you know, helps fill in the new guy so that we can as an audience can learn things.

Despite tension, the US Ambassador to Libya (Matt Letscher) is still there, with a small rental cop security team. He gets worried when he sees people taking pictures of the compound. And worried he should be! Because on September 11, yes that day, some people attack the compound.

Now, our private military CIA people are the only friendlies in the area and they go against orders to try and save the ambassador. They have no support incoming and they are basically going to war with a tiny army, but it is the right thing to do. It is the right thing to do, right?

Also starring David Giuntoli, Max Martini, Pablo Schreiber, Dominic Fumusa, David Denman, David Costabile, and Alexia Barlier.

Shit, there are explosions too. Instead of pews, we get boom boom booms.

I know what I am about to say is terrible criticism for a film and I know it is a word I should try to avoid while writing a review, but after pounding my head, I have no idea how to talk about the movie with any other vernacular. 13 Hours was boring. It dragged. It is almost two and a half hours long and it felt like four. It took a whole hour before the assault on any compound began, which is a shit ton of time to spend to try and make us care for the characters (which doesn’t work).

Sometimes when your goal is ultra realistic combat situations (which this is arguable, clearly many liberties would have been taken), it no longer entertaining. I hated Act of Valor, because they wanted realism at the expense of acting and story and it showed. In this case, Bay wanted to drive home an opinion, honor some people, and explode some shit.

I think forcing someone to watch this movie twice in a row would actually be considered torture and so technically it fits the theme of area the movie is set in. Go figure.

It wasn’t completely terrible, it was just boring. It failed to ever grasp my attention and felt like it would never end. Thankfully, this is the final major movie from January of 2016 that I had to watch. Hooray, I caught up only six months into the year! Too bad the months after it also were filled with bad films.

Bay, stick to Robots and Turtles. At least they are occasionally interesting.

I bet you didn’t know this movie was coming out today. I bet you never heard of it before.

What movie would dare go against Warcraft AND Now You See Me 2? Of course! Puerto Ricans in Paris, an R Rated ethnic comedy starring Luis Guzman!

I don’t want to say that that the demographics for these films are super different. That’d be ridiculous. The demographics for this film would totally want to see Warcraft and Now You See Me 2 before this.

On the title alone, I am surprised that this movie didn’t go straight to DVD or a January release. But hey, low budget films need love to. So I have to give it a chance.

This is the type of film that will play hard into stereotypes.

Our heroes are two cops in NYC, the best city in the world. Luis (Luis Guzman) thinks himself a smart guy who is great at getting counterfeit products off of the street, and Eddie (Edgar Garcia), a regular cop guy. He has a wife (Rosie Perez) and kids, with his wife being Luis’ sister. Yay friendships through marriage.

For whatever reason, they eventually get a case that is specifically for them. Vincent (Frédéric Anscombre) is some fashion or real estate mogul type of guy. One of his main clients is Colette (Alice Taglioni), a huge fashionista in Paris. She designs very expensive and sought after bags. But they have found that one of their bags for the upcoming season has been stolen and being sold to the highest bidder. Vincent needs to fly Luis and Eddie to Paris to figure it out, and if they can do it successfully, they will each get a at $150,000 bonus.

Based on testimony from Colette, there are only a few people who would have access to the bag and might be responsible. So Luis and Eddie get a free trip to Paris (with no loved ones) it should be easy to get paid as well. Then they can fix their relationships at home.

The maybe culprits are played by Julie Ferrier, Lilou Fogli, Charlotte Mangel, and Michaël Cohen, with other roles played by Miriam Shor and Rosario Dawson.

So many tagged names and so few stars.

Puerto Ricans In Paris is a comedy in the way that hanging out with your friends on some couches is a comedy. When you are just hanging out, you are most just chilling and occasional someone makes a joke, you all enjoy the overall experience, but you aren’t just cackling for an hour and a half.

So I am saying that Puerto Ricans in Paris is a very chill film, with some jokes, but one that isn’t going to be remembered as a very funny film at all. Most of the jokes all come from Guzman, who has a larger than life character, as per usual. Garcia plays the straight man, along with the entirety of the cast.

But the story is just average. The plot is basically a slightly longer episode of a generic cop TV show. And by slightly longer, I mean this movie is right under 80 minutes in length. The twists by the end are pretty easy to grasp and the acting from everyone feels very standard.

And that is the issue. Mediocre plot, average acting, and not very funny. That is not a good sign for a film that wants to be considered as a comedy and not an action/drama with the occasional jokes.

This movie is definitely a pass, but you probably weren’t going to see it anyway, since you never would have known it existed.

Right off the bat, there is a big problem with Now You See Me 2. The big problem is that it is called Now You See Me 2.

How in the hell do you have a movie named Now You See Me, and then fail to call the sequel Now You Don’t? It is a really popular phrase, everyone knows it, and you give us this even more generic sequel name. It is like they aren’t trying to be cool.

I didn’t expect there to even be a sequel to the first film. Yes, I gave it a 2 out of 4, but it had one of the worst twist endings of all time. They picked a character that would produce the most confusion and failed to make a movie that made sense. They also blurred the line between real magic and explaining the tricks, because the writers had no idea what to do. They went for cool and splashy and couldn’t pick a side. The only reason I probably gave it an average rating is because it came out the same day as After Earth.

Now, sure, a lot of movies are coming out on this day as well. That is why I saw this one weeks in advance to make sure I had a clear mind before writing the sequel’s review.

Ass shots for everyone, not just the lady, hooray!

Set a year after the events in the first film, The Horsemen have gone missing. Dylan (Mark Ruffalo) is still looking for them, just badly to cover it all up. This angers his boss (Sanaa Lathan) and coworker (David Warshofsky) who think he is a bumbling fool almost. This is all a ploy though, in order to finally bring them back out at a big phone tech reveal.

This Octo company, led by Owen (Ben Lamb) is unleashing some super sexy phone tech, however it will also steal all information from the users and sell the data on the black market. So The Eye has told Dylan to get The Horsemen together to crash the event. You know, Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), McKinney (Woody Harrelson), Wilder (Dave Franco), and Lula (Lizzy Caplan). Wait a minute! She wasn’t a horseman! She is a replacement for Henley, who in the movie wanted out in the year in isolation, so they replaced her. I think the studio was hoping you wouldn’t realize it.

However, bad things happen during their surprise show and the group find themselves now in Macau, China (basically their Las Vegas with a big Magic scene), in the clutches of some rich dude named Walter (Daniel Radcliffe). There is more behind the Octo tech, Walter wants his hands on it and wants The Horsemen to steal it! Oh the layers!

And then, you know, shenanigans.

Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine return, along with Jay Chou and Henry Lloyd-Hughes.

GET IT? He is Harry Potter! In a different magic movie! DO YOU GET IT!?

Now You See Me 2 tried to answer some questions its predecessor failed to do so. The key word being tried. Good. The first one explained how The Horsemen did the first trick and didn’t really explain anything else after that. This time they put a lot more effort into explaining how things work, at the bare minimum some tech terms and concepts, to show hey, this isn’t real magic, it is just tricks.

Except, you know, some of the bigger tricks like Atlas falling backwards into a puddle and disappearing completely except for his clothes. They don’t try to explain that, because the writers put it in because it is cool and have no idea how to actually make it work. This is an example of a movie pretending to be a super smart heist movie, but when they get to complicated matters, they shrug their shoulders, say magic and move on.

So everything is just special effects in real life, unless it is actually magic. You know, like speed hypnotism or whatever, which is used constantly in the film. They refuse to make up their mind.

This film has a big twist near the end too, all about who belongs to the mysterious Eye organization and what their purpose is. Well, the reveal isn’t actually a big surprise, it is a let down, but at least it makes more sense. In fact, it is the type of reveal that would have been better at the end of the first film, not the end of a sequel no one wanted.

Here is a positive. Yes, it was awkward that Caplan was suddenly in this film, but her character was the best and funniest with the most personality to boot. If they decide to punish our life more with a third film, it should be called Now You Three Me and star her with completely new cast besides her.

Two years, Michael Bay released Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a nickelodeon presents film, after 4 or 5 years of delay. And now, just two years later, we have a sequel!

Damn it, in my last one, I mentioned how forgettable the movie was. That means I also wanted to forget about it. But how can I forget about a movie if they go and make a sequel?

This time it is called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out Of The Shadows. Or, TMNT: OOTS for short. Hmmm. Oots. That kind of, if you stretch it a little bit, sounds like OOZE. And ni the previous set of Turtle films, the sequel was called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. Is that a coincidence?

Based on that screen grab, then HELL NO IT ISN’T!

Set a year after the first film, our turtles are now heroes! Just kidding. Leonardo (Pete Ploszek), Michelangelo (Noel Fisher), Raphael (Alan Ritchson), and Donatello (Jeremy Howard) are still hiding in the shadows with Splinter (Peter Donald Badalamenti II, Tony Shalhoub, yes two people), training and existing.

They let Vernon Fenwick (Will Arnett) take all the glory, and people love him for it. But now…now The Shredder (Brian Tee) is about to break out of prison! In fact, his break out involves teleporting, portals, and a whole lot of foot soldiers. And of course, Baxter Stockman (Tyler Perry), smart scientist who wants to do evil to be famous.

And now they have Bebop (Gary Anthony Williams) and Rocksteady (Stephen Farrelly). And the turtles get Casey Jones (Stephen Amell). Basically a nice fair trade. OH AND KRANG (Brad Garrett) is here to tip the balance for the bad guys!

Eh, yeah, I guess Megan Fox returns as April O’Neal, Brittany Ishibashi is female Shredder assistant ninja, and Laura Linney is a police chief or something. It kind of fluctuates.

AW SHIT, KRANG HYPE FOR REAL.

While writing the plot outline, I couldn’t help but feel that this movie was just more of the same, with like, four more characters. And if it is more of the same, then it is still not too good, and making it crowded could add to the problems.

Like, for instance, Shredder not having any cool fight scenes whatsoever in this movie. And Splinter is in the film, but has maybe six lines and maybe a minute of screen time. Krang is only brought in for two scenes, his introduction early on (that goes too hectic and fast, like it was made for people with short attention spans), and then near the end. The ending scene was actually a bit more entertaining and longer, which is a plus.

But that brings us to all of the fight scenes. Basically every fight scene feels blurry and it requires you to fill in the blanks with what is going on. None of the fights are clear, every single one uses this lazy tactic. The first scenes of the movie involve the turtles running around buildings in NYC at night, and it set the bar for low quality action scenes. Hell, the final fight is actually in daylight, but it is still basically ruined with the CGI.

Yes, I both think Krang was cool in this film, while also disappointed in his big fight. The fight looked fun and creative, but again, they just blurred the whole thing together.

Bebop and Rocksteady were okay. They had more personality than the Secret of the Ooze versions and arguably took up all the screen time from Shredder/Splinter. Fox’s character wasn’t interesting, Casey Jones was only in the hockey mask once (early on, not even for the finale), Arnett was still annoying. Linney’s character was really badly done, but probably didn’t have a lot to work on with the scrip.

And honestly, this is the type of film where you might find yourself scratching your head, confused as to why the characters do certain actions. It seems like the dumb or extra complicated route is always chosen. Leonardo was acted far too strongly in the Asshole category, but the other turtles personalities felt right. Oh, and Perry as Baxter is one of the brighter spots as well. Go figure.

I can’t wait to be disappointed by another of these films in 2-3 years.

Watching January movies is important for a movie reviewer, but usually I like to wait until near the end to catch half of them. As of right now, once this review for Dirty Grandpa is finished, I only have one more major January movie to watch. Holy shit, it isn’t even halfway through the year!

I am on the “expected to be shitty” ball this year, which means for the most part, the rest of the year should be mostly quality, right? Right?

Another special fact about this review: It is the first review on this site chosen by my Patrons who are at the $5 level or above! There was a poll and everything for what movie would be today, and they wanted Dirty Grandpa. My Patrons are jerks.

If you want to be a jerk as well, feel free to check out the rewards!

I am contractually obligated now to always include a picture of Shirtless Efron if it happens in the movie.

Death! Death is the reason this movie takes place. The grandmother of Jason Kelly (Zac Efron) has passed away, so the family has to get together for the funeral. Jason used to be close to his grandfather, Dick (Robert De Niro) thanks to Jason’s job as a lawyer keeping him busy.

But Jason is getting married to Meredith (Julianne Hough) in a week! And for some reason, his grandpa wants him to drive him to his home in Florida, taking some time off from work and wedding planning.

And guess what? His grandpa is crass. And horny. He hasn’t had sex in 15 years and he just wants to get laid. The good news is that they run into a group heading to Daytona. Shadia (Zoey Deutch), a former class mate of Jason, Lenore (Aubrey Plaza), who needs to have sex with a professor before she graduates (because she said so), and Bradley (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman), their gay black friend.

Sure, Dick lies about being a professor, but if it works it works. Time to force Jason to party and reconsider his life choices and lie to college chicks!

Also featuring Danny Glover, Adam Pally, Jason Mantzoukas, and Dermot Mulroney.

I am not contractually obligated to show suggestive images, but research shows they bring the clicks.

Whenever I come across a new Robert De Niro movie, I tend to cringe. He hasn’t given a fuck for a long time. He is old, he just wants the money. He did all the good movies in his middle ages, and now he does Last Vegas and Grudge Match. Basically, he is a sign that the movie probably will suck.

And the signs, they are still right.

The movie plays out exactly as one would imagine it does, except with fewer naked bodies than one would expect. De Niro says outlandish things for an old man, people react strangely, and repeat.

There are some nice surprises. Mantzoukas was hilarious in every scene and possibly some of the best work he has ever done outside of The League. Pally as the cousin made me laugh. But the majority of the film is just normal “shocking” humor, over and over. Very little of the film feels unique. It had potential if they fully embraced the Dirty Grandpa aspects, but instead it is a soft R and not hardcore, like say Bad Santa.

A skippable comedy easily, but not the worst that January had to offer.

Is Kindergarten Cop good? I honestly don’t remember. My memories of it are fond, but that is based entirely on the 2-3 jokes I can actually remember. It came out 26 years ago and is probably objectively bad, but since it starred Arnold Schwarzenegger and was directed by Ivan Reitman we can look back on it with some sweet ass nostalgia glasses.

So why the sequel? Fuck if I know. The rights were there, the plot was easy to put forward, and it would involve a large man dealing with kids. Basic 90’s comedy gold. I mean, that is when we also got Mr. Nanny! Nothing funnier than seeing someone with muscles do woman work and deal with shit head kids.

Despite everything, Kindergarten Cop 2 now exists. It is of course not at all related to the first film, straight to DVD, and we have to go on with our lives knowing this to be true. Barring time travel, Kindergarten Cop 2 will now always exist, and maybe even one day a Kindergarten Cop 3.

This would be the world gone mad should there ever be a KC3.

Agent Reed (Dolph Lundgren) is your typical tough guy, no nonsense, detective. His current worries involve getting a Zogu (Aleks Paunovic) into jail. Just your normal bad guy. They have someone in witness protection, Katja (Rebecca Olson), who was a part of his organization and is going to tell everything to put him behind bars.

Thanks to some Zogu shit, we find out that the servers may have been hacked in some way, and now a flash drive exists with the names and locations of everyone on the witness protection program. Zogu wants that flash drive to kill Katja and then no case can be made against him (outside of him killing Katja). But the flash drive was in the possession of a kindergarten teacher who is now dead.

Apparently the kids would know where it was, but after interviewing a few of them they find nothing. So they feel the only thing they can do is for Reed to go undercover and find the flash drive by interrogating them in a friendlier setting. But those darn kids are just so damn annoying.

Argh! Worst assignment ever, am I right?!

Starring Bill Bellamy as his partner, Fiona Vroom, Sarah Strange, Darla Taylor, and sure, let’s list some kids, Raphael Alejandro, Tyreah Herbert, and Abbie Magnuson.

Ah, kids! Still yelling! Ahh!

To be fair, this movie is probably very similar to the first one. I don’t remember. KC ended with the night scene at the radio tower or something right? Only one kid mattered. In this film the whole class was involved at the end, because then you can see little kids pummeling a bad guy. Hilarious!

But I found out the point of this movie. It was to complain about kids these days. That is about it. Schools coddling kids, not allowing things like peanut butter, or chocolate, and being nice and equal and shit. That is where half of the jokes come from. Like it was written by some old geezer who just doesn’t understand change.

The action? Not important or exciting. The Lundren/kid interactions? Not too great. Predictable. Standard.

Kindergarten Cop 2 isn’t even the type of film you would want to put on Netflix while cleaning your house. It is the type that you never watch. Ever. Just don’t.

I met Infinity once. He was at a night club, surrounded by friends and seemed to be in a never ending conversation. The friends were all large and powerful people. Saying “met” is a bit of a stretch, because every time I tried to walk over to him, the distance never seemed to lessen. Eventually I decided reaching Infinity was a long battle I was not going to win, so instead I went home and cried myself to sleep.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was The Man Who Knew Infinity though, an Indian math genius who (eventually) blew the math community away with his theories and identities. And I guess he is a famous enough dude who no one knows about (I don’t, you probably didn’t either), so they want to make a movie about his victories.

You know, like A Beautiful Mind, but with less conspiracies and spy stuff. Or like The Theory of Everything, but with less crippling and romance, and more actual math. The last example isn’t that good, because everyone knows who that wheel chair guy is.

That feeling you get when you’re trying to work and you start hallucinating a large British man is judging you.

Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel) never received formal training in high levels of math. But he was an Autodidact, which the movie never says on its own, but it is someone who can learn a subject at high levels without help. A really rare form of smartness. He can’t explain why he knows everything he knows, without any of the formal training or background, but he knows that they must be true. He can see numbers damn it, and so he understands them pretty damn well.

After some amount of training in India once they find out about his gift, Ramanujan realizes he needs to get published with his equations in order for the rest of the world to get his information. He also doesn’t want to be “second place” by publishing the results because someone else publishes it first. He didn’t want to be the Leibniz to someone else’s Newton.

He searches out for a place to go to publish his work, and at Cambridge, a math professor named G.H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons) takes interest in his work. The only problem with the equations, no matter how “right” they look, is that Ramanujan doesn’t have real proof of any of them. Ramanujan doesn’t understand the concept of mathematical proofs either, he just wants to get his formulas published, proofs be damned. His years also take place at Cambridge right before and during World War I, where British people apparently start to hate Indians making his life more difficult. Heck, he is forced to take classes with these white racist blokes just to get some more background, despite it feeling like a waste of time.

Anyways, this films is about a group of people trying to get their math on and eventually, you know, do basically get their math on.

Also starring Malcolm Sinclair, Raghuvir Joshi, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Stephen Fry, Toby Jones, Jeremy Northam and Padraic Delaney.

To be fair, neither of these men are clearly normal. Look at how they walk and use umbrellas.

Math is something that should be celebrated, including the discoveries of important aspects of math. We all know Newton and uhh, the other guys, but why not some lesser known people? Especially if they aren’t white! So hooray for Srinivasa Ramanujan, a smart guy who deserves his own film! I just wish they could have made it more exciting.

After our star gets to England, the movie feels very repetitive. He wants to publish formulas, professor wants him to come up with proofs, some sort of compromise, then repeat. Bad things happen to Ramanujan, some racist, some natural, and some…also racist, and he pulls through and gets his math on.

It is good to see that he never gives up despite the pressures, but at the same time, the film barely goes heavy on math (despite him being a really heavy on math individual). And the acting from everyone is the most hum drum experience ever. I didn’t see any passion, which can be a problem with the script more than anything.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a smart guy, and eventually he died. That’s really what I learned from the film. A book on his life would probably be a bit more interesting than this movie.

The Boy? Didn’t I already review this one? About the kid who lived with his dad at a motel stop in the mountains who then was all evil and stuff?

Oh, right right right, that was an indie horror movie, so very few people saw it. So it doesn’t matter that two films came out so close together with the same exact name, because the second one was in a lot of theaters and is thus now more well known. The first The Boy I heard wanted to do sequels too. That could be even more potentially confusing if those sequels become popular.

The good news is that the actual movies have virtually nothing in common.

It’s okay when they beat their kids in this film. It is just a doll!

Greta (Lauren Cohan) needs to get away from her life, so she accepts a job as a nanny in Merrie Old England. She has some stuff she wants to just get away from, and moving to another country for a few months might do the job.

When she gets to the place, she finds it to basically be a mansion and surprised that the tenants are an old couple (Diana Hardcastle, Jim Norton). Like really old. So the fact that they have a kid that needs a nanny seems surprising.

Of course, more surprising is that this kid is actually a porcelain doll. But they say he is unique and have a list of strict rules despite his non-aliveness. And also they are totally leaving like, right away for a vacation. If she has more questions, they have a delivery man, Malcolm (Rupert Evans), who is around from time to time. But as long as she sticks to the rules then everything should be fine.

And you know the doll starts moving around and doing things. Also things go missing. Also Greta gets scared.

Featuring James Russell and Ben Robson as well.

Please don’t make love to the doll. I don’t care what the rules say!

I actually went into The Boy knowing nothing at all. No idea it was about a doll that might be alive. I just assumed a creepy little boy being driven by Satan, like most films about kids. But then hey, a doll. Sure. Doll films haven’t had a good track record recently. After all, did you watch Annabelle? I know you didn’t.

The Boy somehow manages to be a horror film that doesn’t want to do a lot of scary scenes. Outside of the last 20 minutes, it feels like a strange drama. We get the doll being in different places! And items getting moved around. And doors getting locked. But never when our leads are watching him, so it is just odd and never scary.

The ending does a nice job of explaining all of the events of the film, but it doesn’t mean the explanation is worth the first hour or so. It is dull and a bit boring. I am glad that it makes sense, it just isn’t an exciting explanation. It unfortunately doesn’t fully explain why everything happened in the film, which is my biggest question after watching it. Instead we get an open ending to a story that should easily have finished already.

The Boy isn’t great, it is barely a horror, and you instead should watch basically anything else.