Tag: 1 out of 4

Rawr Dracula! Vampires! So hot right now, of course we need to revisit the main man behind the bat, the one, the only, Vlad.

Dracula Untold (I promise I won’t get into how much I hate “this is the real story” nonsense for fictional stories that keep happening, I swear) wants to talk about how one man came to be the Dracula that people fear today. A real vampire. Not a sparkly boring person. Not a bunch of kids in private school. Just a guy who has standard vampire powers and standard vampire weaknesses.

But before we get into that, in case you didn’t know, this is becoming a franchise. Not just vampires. But all the classic Universal monsters. It was originally starting with a 2016 remake of The Mummy, then Wolfman, then eventually a Frankenstein thing, but they tacked this one on too. They are going to bring all the monsters into a movie and have them fight other monsters I guess. And it might fail terribly. And yes, it is a lot like Avengers. But I mean, it might be cool, as long as these movies are good, right?

Well, some bad ass armor could help, but why doesn’t it glow and shimmer?

This movie isn’t set in the modern day. I already told you it is about Vlad The Impaler (Luke Evans), the real inspiration for Dracula. Not that Vlad in real life was a vampire, it looks like Bram just took his name and hierarchy and ran with it.

Either way, Mr. The Impaler got his name for being a bad ass. He was recruited at a young age in the army and killed killed killed. Now he is a Prince of his own area, Transylvania, and wants to live life in peace. There is also a local vampire in a cave nearby, but ignore him. Either way, some Turks come knocking on his door, asking for the normal payment. But because some of their scouts were found dead, they assumed the Transylvanians came out and killed them. Now they payment is some cash and 1,000 boys to fill their armies. What! No!

So he goes to Mehmed the Conqueror (Dominic Cooper), the Turk leader to appeal to his better nature. Well, he ain’t having it, even when he offers up himself instead of the boys. Now they want 1001 boys, with the additional one being his son, Ingeras the Young (Art Parkinson).

Well, shit. What’s an Impaler going to do. Sell his soul to the devil for temporary vampire powers to defeat an entire army? Yeah. Thank goodness he knows where Master Vampire the Vampire (Charles Dance) is to get his powers on. As long as he doesn’t drink blood in 3 days, they will be temporary. If not, well, full on vampire.

He also should keep it secret. Very Catholic lands here. They don’t like Vampires. Maybe his lady, Mirena the Woman (Sarah Gadon) will find some parts of it interesting though.

Also featuring Diarmaid Murtagh as Dumitru the Untitled.

Shit, they also got Patsey from Holy Grail in here?

This might be one of those movies that would be better not seeing the trailer? That is my guess. If I didn’t see literally every cool thing a dozen times from trailers, I would have enjoyed the movie more. But Dracula didn’t do anything cooler than those few scenes. Namely the bat attack related scenes.

Other than that, it is mostly a poorly acted period movie. We got accents, we got swords, horses, chivalry and more. And just a lot of bad overly dramatic acting.

And if that is what you want in your “NO THIS IS THE TRUE STORY” films, then you might actually love it.

Unfortunately, no matter what happened with this movie, we were getting the next two anyways. Universal is going to make this Monster Avengers thing happen, damn it. Maybe the final outcome will be cool. Maybe the next movies will be good. But this is not the Iron Man of the Monsters universe, unfortunately.

Documentaries, schmockumentaries. I used to have my documentaries on Friday, but now they are Thursday. Let us cope with it and move on.

Let’s talk about video games, because I like video games. I would refer to myself as a gamer, even if my time is much more limited from the activity. I have to watch a lot of movies, and keep up with TV shows. It is a hard life.

But with a vague title for a documentary, Video Games: The Movie (claiming to be a movie?) could be about so many topics. Most likely it will involve the history of gaming and how it is evolved today. And really, that is all I can imagine it being about. The history of gaming.

And video games! And video games through time!

Sure enough, this documentary is mostly about video games and the history. And how systems have gotten better. And why people who play video games are cool. And how indie games are doing stuff. Hey, maybe the title is because of that other documentary, Indie Game: The Movie? I swear there were more topics, but I was so bored throughout the movie that it is really easy to forget.

Here are some of the problems. Outside of video games, it didn’t really have a lot of focus. It goes from segment to segment, about different topics, some interviews with some people, and shit ton of filler footage of just video game footage. That might sound like a good thing, but when there is just randomly 2 minutes of video game segments of various games for whatever topic, that just isn’t exciting to watch. That is boring. The segments are so unconnected, you could put them in any order and the movie would feel the same. They even have musical intro/outros for each section which makes it feel even more disjointed.

Obviously this thing isn’t going to have anything about Gamer Gate, for you people who think it would. Come on now. This thing was made like a year or so ago, and Gamer Gate is only a month or so old.

Another complaint? They show this huge timeline of gaming history and start going chronological through it, but they have major events in it that they skip. Then they start going out of order, going forward and backwards, and the events on the time line seemed to be different and change. And they still ignored a lot of stuff on there. Why show it on a timeline if you aren’t explaining it? The time line was an annoying clusterfuck.

But this documentary is still super boring. Definitely don’t watch it if you like video games. And don’t if you know nothing about them. Just read wikipedia articles.

Another V/H/S movie, another year. I liked the first two installments. They offered me a lot of variety, some bad, some really good, at least most of them were okay tales and pretty dang unique. I like the anthology format, as a lot of these stories you wouldn’t expect to last a full movie.

There isn’t a lot I can really say about V/H/S: Viral ahead of time. A few short horrors, one that plays between them that somehow branches them all together. Like before, this one was released on V.O.D. before a small theatrical run, in order for people to watch at their home for Halloween I guess.

Turn around bright eyes.

For this part of the franchise, we have an astounding FOUR short stories that make up the entire movie, including the one that is spread throughout the film. The main story, I guess, is Vicious Circles, and involves a police chase of an ice cream truck throughout Los Angeles. It interests a lot of the community, hoping to grab shitty cell phone footage to place it on youtube.

We have Dante The Great, a story about an illusionist who finds a magical cape that grants him real magical power, but one that needs to feast on the blood of others.

There is Parallel Monsters, about a man who builds a portal into an parallel universe, right when his parallel universe does the same. Everything seems identical, so they agree to explore the others side for 15 minutes, but of course, not everything is as similar as it seems.

And finally, Bonestorm, about a group of people wanting to film a skateboarding video, who head to Tijuana where there are big ditches that no one would care if they did tricks there. And then they also get involved with a Mexican cult.

There was supposed to be a story called Gorgeous Vortex, which was apparently cut for some unknown reason. I just know it was sixteen minutes long and it did not make it to the final movie (but I think I even still saw it mentioned in the credits, awkwardly enough).

First thing of note, this is incredibly disappointing in terms of number of stories. I feel cheated, like I barely got enough diversity.

The main story is terrible. For whatever reason, despite the good technology to capture all of the events, was full of class video tape stylized cut and screech noises, and it got totally annoying. It didn’t make any sense until the end, where it was kind of cool, but very disappointing leading up to it.

Dante The Great didn’t match the V/H/S style at all. It was very shitty and I don’t even want to count it as a short on this movie. It would have been better without it.

Parallel Monsters was the only good story of the bunch. It had a nice sci-fi concept and told a bizarre story. I still think it had too much filler in the middle, where it was just being weird without advancing the plot any forward.

And Bonestorm? I think it had a good concept, but the main characters were very annoying, it took too long to get to Mexico, and then when the cult appeared, it became incredibly confusing as to what was happening, who was dead, who was dying, and a lot of chaos made the end almost unwatchable and not exciting.

This is the worst addition to the franchise, by far. And based on the Vicious Circles story, it kind of gave the whole thing a bit of closure. But I assume they will still keep trying to milk this franchise, because it is cheap, and they don’t need to come up with 90 minute plot lines. I have no issues with the anthology horror genre, but this one is so much worse than the other two, it is incredibly disappointing.

And So It Goes is one of the many films I decided to skip the pre-screening and wait a lot longer to see it. I had nothing better to do that night, so I went home instead of watching the movie.

I just couldn’t justify waiting hours in line. Look at the main poster. The title is just vague enough to make it about anything. Brought to us by Rob Reiner, this film wasn’t even really advertised in any way.

Sure his last film he made I really liked, Flipped. I found it adorably cute. But he also did The Bucket List, which just seems to pander to the viewer in the worst ways.

I make sure to show my biases before a review, and most of the time I feel pretty neutral. But man, this movie has an uphill battle as it just looks like a pointless, slightly emotional, predictable, waste of time.

Alcohol? That would totally give this film an edge if they didn’t look so happ (y.

Oren Little (Michael Douglas) is a mean old grouchy old man, and a real estate agent. He is incredibly wealthy, had a son who is a disappointment to him, and he doesn’t like to talk about it. He is ready to retire, sell his old house for several millions, and get away from everything and live out of his life in bliss elsewhere. But for now, he is living in a building he owns, an apartment complex. You know, it’d be weird to sell your house if you still lived there and didn’t want it to seem that way.

But then Mr. Disappointment (Austin Lysy) shows up at the home’s door step, ruining a potential buyer. Apparently the kid has some more bad news. He will be serving time for 6-8 months and needs someone to watch over his daughter. Whoa whoa. Oren has a grand daughter?! Soon to be 10 Sarah (Sterling Jerins) needs someone to look up to, and she might as well assume her grandpa will help out in that department. But of course, he doesn’t want this shit.

Thankfully one of his neighbors isn’t so entirely sick of Oren’s shit to ignore the daughter. Which is where Leah (Diane Keaton) really comes into the picture. A widowed lounge singer now, she tries to assume the best about people and usually she is wrong.

Can she with the help of the girl maybe turn this grouchy old groucho around?

I dunno. You be the judge!

Well shit. The movie ended up being a pointless, slightly emotional, predictable, waste of my time. Incredible. I looked up to see a few stats and saw that this movie had a budget of 30 million.

30 million to make? What? There were like five sets in the entire picture. How much money did Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton demand? It must be at least 15 million of that price, because everyone else involved was no names anyways.

The neighbors I didn’t tag or talk about because they all don’t matter. Their plot lines in the predictable movie are also predictable. They keep getting themselves involved in Oren’s life until he realizes he must not hate them either after all. Yay family. Yay friendship.

Apparently money doesn’t buy happiness, which is the theme of the movie. But that isn’t even true by itself. Because everyone knows that money definitely helps happiness. If he was poor, Oren couldn’t have handled that kid or gotten it on with Diane Keaton. There was also a very awkward scene with the girls mother, but it was less than a minute of screen time and ended very awkwardly. Awkwardly in terms of story telling, as they glossed over a lot of what must have happened and she was seemingly never talked about again. Kind of fucked up.

Shame on you movie. Shame.

Another day of planned movie watching was foiled by my inability to remember to bring my movies to my movie watching location. So I had to improvise, yet again, and yet again, I went for one that I could find that was super weird.

So hey. Attack of the 50 Foot Cheerleader. Ah, clearly that is a throwback to one of the more famous original Sci-Fi B-Movie Drive-In Theater of all time: Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. This is just a more specific version of a woman, with a completely different plot, and probably a few elements that would have never made it on film in the 1950s.

Like boobies.

However, both may have had obvious references to Gulliver’s Travels. Who knows.

Cassie Stratford (Jena Sims) is “ugly” and a boring nerd in college. Sure, she somehow has a job as a researcher that has helped develop a new chemical that can increase the strength and attributes of an object. Kind of also restoring its use. Pretty vague. Going to be used to make plastic surgery stay good longer.

But Cassie is “ugly” and going for a sorority that her mother was in and is trying to be a cheerleader. That is the only way her mom will pay for college (because he job doesn’t and presumed smarts don’t help with that). Things are obviously going badly, so of course Cassie puts some of that formula into her blood stream. Next day, she is sexy, confident, and athletic. Now she is able to impress most of the sorority and cheer squad! Well, not the head person of course. Brittany Andrews (Olivia Alexander) is totes jelly and angry about it all. She loses her popularity, especially when Cassie grows taller making her seem a hulking amazon woman.

Yep, looks like the drugs have some adverse side effects. In fact, Cassie might grow so big the government has to get involved. Oh no, not the government!

Thankfully she has her nerdy yet hunky coworker Kyle (Ryan Merriman) looking out for her to fix things. And her super down to earth roommate Jett (Sasha Jackson) for some form of support!

Spoilers: This movie does end with a giant woman cat fight.

I’ve done these strange college sex comedies films before. Most recently it was The Coed and the Zombie Stoner, which was a surprisingly entertaining film for the genre, with an original plot line, some acting, some funny jokes, and more. This is a completely different type of movie. It is one of those movies trying too hard to be a B movie and instead just making a boring piece of movie.

Unlike others in the genre, it isn’t really ever funny. They go for some shocking scenes and sudden naked moments to get their laughs, but all of it just feels forced and yawn inducing.

And it also features some terrible CGI just to remind you that they are going for B Film status. It was even made by Roger Corman, the asshole who makes all of these terrible movies for Sy Fy. It is his first 3D movie too. I didn’t watch it in 3D, but it was made obvious by some incredibly awkward scenes and camera placements that they wanted the items to jump out of you.

The entire thing ends up being an unfunny, unoriginal waste of time that fails to live up to its genre.

Milestone Milestone Milestone Review!

Welcome to my 1200th review for my website. Yes, thank you, thank you, thank you. I have had a hard time finding general themes to go with for some of these bad boys. My attempt to do a good milestone review for Trapped In The Closet was met with large yawns. My best ones have been taking arguably well known shitty movies and going indepth over them. Like the Twilight movies.

But more recently I have noticed that a few of my last milestone reviews have been live action remakes of child hood classics that have left the fans angry or confused. Namely, Dragonball: Evolution and Speed Racer. So why not the reverse?

A CGI “remake” of live action child hood classics? Namely, the 2007 TMNT. Sure, there was cartoons too, but the movies were hugely successful and everyone I knew watched them.

How many people did I know that watched TMNT?

The same number you see here in this picture!

New York City…

Just kidding. This movie doesn’t start in the Big Turtle. We are going to Central America, where April O’Neal (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is looking for some artifacts. That is what she does now. Looks for relics for rich people, because fuck journalism. She hears some rumors and lo and behold, that sneaky sanchez Leonardo (James Arnold Taylor) is out and about. Apparently he was sent down to work on his leadership, by Spliter (Mako) for some reason or another.

I heard it was cause some guy was running around NYC with a mask and fighting crime, not the turtles!

Oh shit, there are two people running around with masks!

What are the rest of the Turtles doing? Well, not a lot. They beat Shredder some point before the movie, so they have free time. Donatello (Mitchell Whitfield) is working from home as an IT specialist. Michelangelo (Mikey Kelley) works for kids birthday parties where he gets beaten with bats! And Raphael (Nolan North)? Well, he sleeps all day and does nothing.

Because he is roaming the streets at night as Nightwatcher battling crime.

Well shit, that mystery didn’t last long.

April is working for this man, Winters (Patrick Stewart), who really loves statues. Just kidding, Winters is secretly this ass hat Yaotl, an immortal being from 3,000 years ago in the Aztecs. He opened up a portal to another universe to get his power on, making him immortal, but his generals were turned to stone. Then, after that, 13 immortal beasts come out of the portal and fuck up his enemies and his own armies. Everything is lost. He is not an immortal being, his staff are stone, and he kind of wants to open the portal again to get some more shit done.

So the ancient relic was actually a stone statue and one of his generals. Aw yeah. Time for shenanigans.

Don’t look so fucking shocked. Bad guys do bad things.

He actually is able to use his future tech rich company to make them alive again! But they are still stone. Awkward. Doesn’t matter.

In order to bring some relevant Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action into this movie, they have the foot clan! No longer led by Shredder, cause Shredder is gone, but now ninja Karai (Ziyi Zhang) is running things. They were hired to find and contain the 13 mythical beasts.

Apparently they have been running amuck on Earth for the last 3000 years and no one noticed? Really hard to say.

Well, Leo returns and they are told to stay hidden until they can be a team again, so they don’t. They find one of the beasts and a foot clan, help and then get knocked the fuck out by some stone generals who appear. Awkward. So they are forced to stay put this time for serious. Except one team member refuses.

And he is an angry one, that Ralph.

Nightwatcher goes out and Leo finds him. He doesn’t want Nightwatcher to be a vigilante. So they fight, shirtless, in the rain, and HOLY SHIT IT IS RAPHAEL.

Through the fight, Leo gets captured by the bad guys and Raphael feels totally bad you guys. Especially since the bad guys might offer up Leo as a sacrifice to the portal in lieu of one of the monsters. All sorts of fucked up there.

We already went over this. Bad guys gonna be bad.

Except not. This Winters/Yaotl fellow doesn’t want to wreck havoc. He wants to stop being immortal and free himself and his generals. But the generals? They like being immortal, and they like even more their powers and movement. So, despite Winters actually secret good intentions, they aren’t down with it and want to get their fight on.

So the Turtles, April, and Casey (Chris Evans) (Who I don’t feel bad not mentioning until now), along with the Foot Clan show up to help save the day. They have to find the last monster, defeat new monsters, defeat generals and hope the shenanigans are stopped in time!

And of course they do. They are able to find the last monster and have it push itself and the generals into the portal, which is sealed forever. Yay, fuck those generals.

Not literally nor all at once.

Welp, day is saved, everyone wins, and time to go home.

The End.

So I guess I can start talking about the film now?

Like the recent live action version,this film does stay true to the general characters, their attitudes, and made them feel individually cool. Because it is animated and not the 1990s, they were able to actually use their weapons. And the fact that it didn’t get bogged down with an origin story is awesome.

However, outside of those things, most of which are expected, there was only one entertaining scene in the whole film. Just one. The rooftop battle between Leo and Ralph in the rain. It was super sexy and a bit gorgeous.

This picture does it justice, just doesn’t save the film.

One sweet scene doesn’t a good movie make.

The humor was shitty, the CGI outside of that scene felt old, even by 2007 standards, like a very cheap CGI TV show.

I am fine having a plot without Shredder, really, but they picked such whogivesashit villains with a lot of pointless attributes that at no time is it exciting, nor is it ever really sensical. I remember the cartoon. Give me that giant dude with the brain storage in his stomach. That guy is cool. These guys are not, especially when the main villain isn’t even a villain either.

Even kids would be bored with this movie, and it is flashy animation.

The recent remake was not a great thing for this series, but this CGI version was an even worse slight to the franchise. I bought a bootleg version of this film in Greece from a Nigerian in 2007 and forgot to ever watch it. I only picked it because I knwe it was still in theaters. My 2007 self knew it would be a disappointment. And now all of you do too.

Rage starring Cage.

I think that was the reasoning behind this entire movie. It is a tagline that I don’t think anyone ended up using though. Come on guys, it was right in front of you.

Nick Cage has been in a lot of movies, always. He is the type of guy who never says no, going for the intense indie numbers like Joe, and for the straight to DVD shitty action movies like…well, a lot more of his recent stuff.

So why did I watch Rage? Well, I needed to watch a movie and wanted something about 90 minutes. One of the first random ones I saw on Netflix at all. Knew nothing about it outside of my fictional tag line, so I was ready to be surprised either way.

The good news is we still get some intense new CageFaces.

This story is about Paul Maguire (Cage), an honest business man who cares about an honest days of work. He earned an empire starting a construction business in Alabama and is pretty successful now. Good job! But of course he had mob help. He used to be in the mob with his buddies Danny (Michael McGrady) and Kane (Max Ryan). They got a lot of cash from the Russians, thanks to some thievery, and he used it to help finance his business a few years later.

Well, on a night out, a couple of thugs break into his house. His daughter Caitlin (Aubrey Peeples) is taken (not like the movie), and her two friends (Jack Falahee, Max Fowler) were beat up and left behind to tell the tale. Shit. Look’s like Paul’s past has caught up with him. Now he has to figure out if the Russians finally figured out what he did or not, before his daughter pays the price!

Just kidding, they later find his daughter dead. Too late. No, this is not a rescue mission like Taken. This is a revenge flick.

So Cage is mad, and he won’t let anything stop him from getting revenge. Not his wife (Rachel Nichols), not his former boss (Peter Stormare), not the Russian mob boss (Pasha D. Lychnikoff), and not even Danny “Getting Too Old For This Shit 27 years ago” Glover.

His face just looks like an angry plastic mask the entire film.

Ah, see. This isn’t just an action shoot em up revenge movie. There is a some drama/thriller stuff too. And twists and turns! And mob warfare.

And it is still incredibly boring. The plot twists I couldn’t see coming, mostly because they were pretty fucking stupid. Strong words, strong opinions. All true.

Man, was this movie stupid. I couldn’t believe how much of a waste of time this 90 minutes felt to me. It offered nothing new and had some shitty action. It also had some shitty backstory plots.

So why not a 0? Because of one dang scene. Cage was yelling at a friend and being all intense about things. I felt real emotion from Cage during this one scene and thought it would have taken a lot of takes to get that sort of intensity. That one scene saved this boring as fuck movie.

I actually had the opportunity to watch The Signal in theaters when it came out. For free. There was a pre-screening one whole day before it came out to make you feel special and I had tickets to go. The only issue was it started four hours after I got off of work and I didn’t want to wait around for the random movie. Hell, even the director told me I should go see it.

But apathy took over, and even the random picture didn’t help.

The only thing that drove me to watching this movie at this point was having the time and nothing better to do. (Which is relative. I had less than 2 hours of time and nothing to do. Plenty of other movies I wanted to see above it).

How I picture the face of William Eubank when he found out I didn’t go.

MIT students come in all shapes and sizes. Like Nic (Brenton Thwaites) who has muscular dystrophy, (which chrome wants to auto correct to astrophysics…foreshadowing?!). He is helping take his girlfriend, Haley (Olivia Cooke) to school, along with his MIT friend Jonah (Beau Knapp). Those two are in trouble with MIT because a hacker named NOMAD hacked into MIT servers using their IPs or something, so MIT rightfully assumed it was them.

But outside of that, Nic wants to end the relationship, because long distance + deteriorating disease = not a good time.

While almost to California, they get strange signals in the middle of nowhere Nevada. In fact, they think it is Nomad. They kind of want to show them a piece of their mind.

Next thing they know, people start flying around, darkness, scares, loud noises. Boom. Waking up in a very white room with people wearing protective hazmat suits around them. And at the center of it all is Damon (Laurence Fishburne), who tells them they have been in contact with aliens and need to be studied. Well screw that. They aren’t lab rats. He wants to get out of there. Hopefully he feels less diseased and more powerful after that alien encounter.

Hopefully.

“Da fuq mate, don’t come near me with your ectoplasm.”

Sorry director who tweeted me. But I am glad I didn’t waste four or so hours of my life waiting to see this movie and then watching it. It had some unique moments in it, especially near the end. But the first 4/5 of the film just felt so weak and underwhelming. I can blame this solely on the actors involved too. I like Olivia Cooke in Bates Motel, but her character wasn’t given a lot to work with. It was mostly Nic with a lot of Damon and neither of them impressed me. They were pushing me towards sleep almost.

It is definitely unique, in a few ways. Lets not take away that aspect. And it is for sure Science Fiction. Some nice turns along the way and a lot of not nice ones.

It is hard to explain just what it bad about this, outside of just being super boring. The side romance plot was also weak, and the other best friend, he can just get out of this movie completely for all I care.

If you had to see a movie about signals, go see Contact.

Whoa, when did the first half of September turn into shit? Not making biases or anything, but there are not a lot of releases for Labor day weekend or the week after it. We don’t see big titles until mid September. What is this? January? Because even January has big titles, they are just usually big shitty titles. This is just…just nothing coming out for a couple weeks.

The November Man is the only real big release coming out for Labor Day Weekend, which makes it like an anti-Memorial Day weekend. There is a horror, but that is a lot more limited and didn’t really have a lot of advertising.

So, like it or not, The November Man, coming out in September, becomes the biggest release. Even if it looks like an awkward shitty spy thriller that might have gone straight to DVD, it gets to be the big draw to the theaters. Boooo. Booooo.

Full of generic action scene cliches, if we are lucky.

The November Man. Why is Devereaux (Pierce Brosnan) called that? Well, according to the trailer, the CIA used to call him that because after he came through, nothing lived. Fuck. That has got to be the worst/cringe inducing reasoning for a nickname that I have ever heard. Seriously. Nicknames are organic things that are kind of on the spot based on a small reference. Does the nickname make sense? Sure. Can a normal person organically come up with that without a lot of thought? Fuck no. Even after describing that to someone, they might not get it right away.

So Devereaux used to be in the CIA and was, I guess, a killing machine. A few years ago, while training a young operative Mason (Luke Bracey), a kid got killed during an operation, and Deveraux decided to call it quits. He just wanted to retire in Switzerland, like any sane person.

But now, present day? His old handler, Hanley (Bill Smitrovich), has called him back in. They have to extract a woman out of Russia. This woman has information on Arkady Federov (Lazar Ristovski) who is primed to be the next president of Russia. This information she has is a game changer. And she asked for Devereaux by name.

Factor in a Belgium social worker (Olga Kurylenko), some other CIA people (Caterina Scorsone, Will Patton), a reporter (Patrick Kennedy) and a Russian assassin (Amila Terzimehic), and you got yourself a political action thriller.

“Okay Pierce, can you give us a grimace?”
“Can I?!!?”

I will be the first to admit that I didn’t hate all of the the movie. Despite the beginning of the films best efforts to make it look like a shitty Luc Besson movie, eventually the movie started to make some amount of sense. A little bit. It definitely has its shares of twists and turns, if you are into that sort of thing. And I guess, for the most part, they make sense.

That is a stretch. This film has a lot of plot holes. When there are too many twists, early character actions don’t always make a lot of sense. We can chalk it up to deception, but…people aren’t that smart.

Follow up to that. The main character is not a hero in anyway. He kills a lot of people. A lot of US citizens in the CIA, who aren’t bad guys at all, but don’t know what is going on and are just following orders. He feels no remorse either, just killing everybody on every side. It is terrible. Speaking of killing, the ending series of events was also bad because he could have killed one of the main legit bad guys and didn’t. It would have solved his problems and not put the people he cares about in harms way.

Just a mess of a movie. It had some interesting parts. But a cringey title, bad hero, and bad decisions for smart characters turn me completely off.

In the town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, Luis Ramirez was killed.

Luis is a Mexican immigrant, one of the many to move to the small town over the last few years to work in nearby mattress factories. Shenandoah used to be a coal mining town, a lot of European immigrants, but that eventually shut down, so now they are just another small town with low incomes and high school football to get them by.

Oh yeah. High School Football. Like the team who ended up killing Luis Ramirez one night, turning a simple beating of a Mexican into a killing thanks to a few kicks to the head.

Shenandoah captures the town in its aftermath, how they were affected by the racial based beating, how the high school football team started to do after it, and how the court case went down.

I can’t even.

The unfortuante news is, you can probably already figure out where this story goes. Spoilers, there is a some major disappointment and parts of the documentary that will make you swell with anger.

But at the same time, this is a story I have heard before. I have read about it in books and seen documentaries of similar cases where racial injustice happened in small towns around America, and it still happens to this day. Maybe this one is more relevant because it wasn’t in the 1960s or 20th century, but just half a decade ago. But I just couldn’t find myself captivated by it nor did I find it really too shocking.

On top of that, I thought it was a shoddy documentary. It felt poorly put together, full of awkward scenes that didn’t really help tell the story, but was just talking to people in general. I am glad they went to Mexico and talked to the guy’s family about it, but it felt like it was filled with so much useless crap, I didn’t care by the end.

Well, obviously I still cared. And it is good to know that not everything ended so badly (outside of someone losing their life). But this documentary needed a lot more umph in it to make me care about something I have seen again and again.