I Saw the TV Glow (2024)/ The Watchers (2024)
I Saw the TV Glow is a strange experience by design, a hallucinatory ode to early 1990s television, coming of age sagas, feeling out of place in one’s own body and mind, and on a Lynchian dream logic wavelength that few filmmakers occupy. From a plot standpoint, Owen (Justice Smith) is a shy kid who looks up to an older girl at school, Maddy (Bridget Lundy-Paine), and they share a love for the TV show The Pink Opaque, a tween-aimed horror series in the vein of Goosebumps or Are You Afraid of the Dark?, which ultimately might be real after all. This movie exists more on a slippery emotional plane than on its story sense. Writer/director Jane Schoenbrun (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair) has created an allegory for self-actualization and self-acceptance through a love of 90s nostalgia and that transitional time of being young and just seeing the cusp of what adulthood promises for the good, the bad, and the mundane. The recreation of the SNICK-era television is perfect, and I loved the little glimpses of these horror monsters taking on new nightmarish incarnations. I wanted the movie to explore its premise more, that this old TV show might be real and posing a danger that only they would uncover. It’s really more a pathway for the characters to explore their selves, what animates them, what confuses them, what provides a sense of community. It’s a movie about the perils of loneliness and finding an outlet, a life raft, whatever that may be, and for Owen it’s this TV show. He connects more with this world than the real one, and when he revisits it later as an adult, it doesn’t live up to his memory. It’s a weird movie but it’s designed for weird kids, or weird adults who used to be weird kids, who found kinship through weird media. It’s a slow and provocative experience that asks you to give yourself over to its vision, but Schoenbrun also makes that engagement quite accessible. While existing as a clear trans allegory, I Saw the TV Glow is open to any outsider who felt unsure of themself and their body and their place in the universe. It’s about obsession and the price of holding onto said childhood obsessions, even if they prove disappointing in your adulthood. It doesn’t offer any general answers or catharsis and is kept on the slowest of slow burns. I began daydreaming of the less arty version of its spooky premise, but that’s simply not going to be this movie. I Saw the TV Glow is impressively personal and surreal and obtuse, but by the end I was hoping for a little more of a foundation to hold onto and its ideas to be fully realized.
Nate’s Grade: B
The expansion of the M. Night Shyamalan creative dynasty has begun. While based on a 2022 novel by A.M. Shine, The Watchers is brought to us primarily by Ishana Shyamalan, who makes her feature directing debut and adapted the screenplay. It has a buzzy premise that feels at home in a Shyamalan movie, namely a young woman (Dakota Fanning) who stumbles into a strange location with captive people telling her she cannot leave or her life will be in danger from monsters. The group of survivors have to “perform” for their unseen watchers, staring into a two-way mirror inside a closed room. There are certain rules that are hazy and unevenly applied: don’t go out after dark, never turn your back to the mirror, don’t go into the creatures’ subterranean dwelling. This poses an intriguing mystery for a while as the movie unpacks and reveals more about this world and the creatures. However, The Watchers ultimately cannot help feeling like an over-extended episode of a sci-fi anthology TV series like Black Mirror or maybe even Shyamalan’s own Apple Plus series Servant (Ishana wrote and directed several episodes). There just isn’t enough here. The revelations do not sustain our emotional and intellectual investment. Once it’s revealed what the monsters are, I kept waiting for extra levels of twists and turns, and there really aren’t any. Once we settle into Act Three, the movie becomes more or less about housekeeping and gaining acceptance. The whole reason the protagonist is on her journey is to deliver a bird in a cage, and every time this thing keeps appearing even so late into the movie, while she’s running for her life but cannot forget about the caged bird, I felt like laughing. It’s a case of inelegantly finding a way for the visual metaphor (the bird is her!) to continue being tied to the plot after it long stopped making sense. Likewise, there are cutaways to the captives watching a Love Island/Big Brother-stye reality TV show, but little is made as far as commentary on communal voyeurism, so they just come across as little odd comic asides. The movie loses some serious momentum once we get to the convenient info dump sequence (a Shyamalan family favorite: scientist vlogs) and you realize there are no more tricks to deliver. It’s disappointing that a movie with such potent folklore atmosphere becomes a lackluster variation on The Village.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 (2024)
The first Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey was, unquestionably, my worst film of 2023. It wasn’t merely a bad horror movie, it was a depressingly cynical cash-grab with such little forethought of how to subvert the wholesome legacy of its classic characters. As I said in my review: “The startling lack of imagination of everything else is depressing, as is the fact that this movie has earned over four million at the global box-office, hoodwinking enough rubberneckers looking for a good bad time. The problem is that Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is only a bad bad time.” Oh, dear reader, I wasn’t looking forward to the inevitable deluge of follow-ups, as writer/director Rhys Frake-Waterfield would resupply his surprising success with further sinister revisions to public domain properties. He’s planning on a “Poohniverse” crossover event with a combination of Pooh, evil Pinnochio, vengeance-fuelled Bambi, and a traumatized or villainous Peter Pan. Again, schlocky movies that lean into their schlock can be wonderful things, but a movie that does next to nothing with its subversive hook, with the history of its cutesy iconography, and could be easily replaced with any other menacing slasher killer is beyond lazy, it’s insulting. I figured there could be nowhere to go but up with a sequel, and while Blood and Honey 2 is an improvement in just about every way, it’s still not enough to qualify as a fun or ironic treat.
Wakefield and new co-writer Matt Leslie (Summer of 84) completely rework the mythology and history established in the first movie, which is now revealed to be the literal movie-within-a-movie of the account of the Massacre of the 100 Acre Wood where Pooh and Piglet slaughtered a troupe of bad-acting British coeds. In this prior film, it was established that Pooh and his buddies were angry with Christopher Robin (Scott Chambers, replacing Nikolai Leon) when he left for college. They felt abandoned and grew feral and monstrous, rejecting the ways of man (though still wearing the clothes of man and driving the cars of man). However, now in the sequel it’s revealed they were always feral and blood-thirsty and it was Christopher who incorrectly remembered them as cute and fluffy. This scene makes for the hilarious visual of a child waving innocently at a blood-strewn manimal lurking about. Also, Christopher had a young brother who was abducted by the creatures of the 100 Acre Wood and never seen again. Also also, there was a mad scientist who was creating human-animal hybrids from missing children, so the blood-thirsty animals might not be actual animals after all (can you see where this is going?). While the first Blood and Honey movie did nothing with the characters, this movie actively gives them a tragic history with some twists and turns, enough to lay a mythos. The use of hypnotherapy-induced flashbacks isn’t exactly smooth or subtle, but I’ll take it. At least this movie provides a distinguishing plot that makes some use of its particular elements. Don’t mistake me, dear reader, this is faint praise at best, but after enduring the creatively bankrupt first film, it’s like a desperately needed oasis. Ultimately, it might all just be a mirage but at least it’s something to those of us who suffered!
In the grand sequel tradition, bigger is better, and now instead of two ferocious beasts wreaking havoc, it’s four, with the addition of Owl (Marcus Massey) and Tigger (Lewis Santer). None of these monsters has a particular style or attitude that distinguishes them. I guess Tigger calls people “bitch” a lot and slashes people. There is one point where hapless cops are investigating a crime scene and say, “Let’s bounce,” and Tigger says from the luxury of the shadows, “Hey, that’s my line.” I figured they’d incorporate the signature Tigger bounce on his tail, but perhaps that was too expensive to perform or that bounce was more a byproduct of the Disney version of the character, still under copyright, and not the available A.A. Milne version. The animal costumes look better than the cheap Halloween masks of the original, though for my money Owl looks more like a turkey vulture wearing cray paper. I’m sure we’ll get Kanga in the inevitable third movie in 2025 where her zombie baby leaps out of her pouch to feed on brains. There is a snazzy addition late into the proceedings where Pooh is welding a fiery chainsaw. It makes little sense for the character but it’s cool, so it’s excusable in lapsed movie logic.
I was hoping for more unique kills, twisted takes related to the characters, like Pooh turning some poor soul’s head into a honeypot. The kills are just grizzly and extensive, favoring quantity over quality. There are plenty of decapitations, gougings, impalings, and other fraught and violent encounters, nearly all of them featuring squealing, terrified women. It’s always women that seem to get the worst in these movies, but of course this is a feature and not a bug of the genre back to its 80s heyday. It gets relentless but I suppose at least these girls aren’t having their tops mysteriously fall off while they’re being butchered. A third act rave set piece features maybe two dozen kills and risks becoming tedious slaughter. It got to the point where I was hoping not to see another cowering person hiding behind a corner because it meant the sequence was going to be even more unbearably long (I’m not personally cut out for the Terrifiers).
In between the spillings of blood and guts is the attempts at human drama, namely Christopher Robin trying to live a normal life while also re-examining his past. Apparently people think he’s to blame for the massacre from the 100 Acre Wood, and so he’s become a pariah, whose very presence unsettles others. He’s trying to find steady work in a hospital setting but he’s blacklisted from pursuing his career because of the negative attention his name generates. He even has a romance with a single mom so that when the Robin family is inevitably skewered we have other characters that can be personally threatened to provide meaningful stakes. The life of Christopher Robin and his discovery of repressed memories makes for a surprising story foundation for Blood and Honey 2, especially when the plot of its predecessor was mostly Christopher being held prisoner and the baddies casually roaming and killing coeds. I think Chambers is a better actor as well, and he’s posed to be the writer/director of Neverland Nightmares, which just began principal photography a month and a half ago as of this writing. Good luck, guy.
While the budget has increased tenfold, Blood and Honey 2 is still a scuzzy, sleazy slasher movie at heart. If you’re in the mood for a low-budget exploitation movie heavy with gore, there may be enough to qualify this sequel as moderately mediocre, which again is a marked improvement from what I declared the worst movie of 2023. I’ll credit the influence of co-writer Matt Leslie to try and put some standards in place for this runaway gravy train of IP allocation. What’s scariest of all is what Frake-Waterfield’s unexpected success has wrought, encouraging imitators to jump on his now proven novelty act. There’s a 2025 Steamboat Willie horror movie called Screamboat as Steamboat Willie has now entered the public domain (but not other versions of Mickey). Will it be any good? I sincerely doubt it. Will it make money from curious horror hounds looking for an ironic twist on a wholesome childhood fixture? Most assuredly. This is our present. This is our future, and it’s the legacy of Frake-Waterfield and his ilk that stumbled onto a lucrative novelty act. Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 is just bad, and for that it’s an improvement.
Nate’s Grade: D+
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Back to Black (2024)
What do you remember about Amy Winehouse? The tragic singer with the booming voice that was mercilessly picked apart by a rabid tabloid media, as well as rampant online speculation, over every step of her addiction to drugs and alcohol? If that’s the extent of your memory, as well as some of her more notable songs like “Rehab” or “Back to Black,” then this musical biopic directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson (Fifty Shades of Grey, Nowhere Boy) is going to feel like a shallow exercise in piling on a troubled and talented performer gone far too soon.
Back to Black, the film, literally has Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela) vocalize what she wants to be remembered for, not the drugs and alcohol, and the movie then erases Amy as a vibrant, complicated human being into a blurred statistic on the dangers of unchecked addiction. You can’t tell her story without documenting her demons, and yet the movie also seems exceptionally forgiving to the men who contributed to her downfall, her doting father Mitch (Eddie Marsan) who enabled her and her bad boy boyfriend Blake (Jack O’Connell) who introduced her to hard drug abuse. We spend so much emphasis on the bad times and her downfall and yet the movie is strangely reticent to cast much judgment on her bad influences, which makes it seem like the movie is further blaming Amy. At the same time, her downfall is focused on being rejected by a man, which is really insulting and limiting for her as an artist as well as a person capable of independent thought. It’s an even stranger decision given that these two influences, her father and ex, were given withering condemnation in the 2015 Oscar-nominated documentary on Winehouse. Apparently, Mitch Winehouse was furious with the documentary’s portrayal of him and Amy. His secondary complaint was that the documentary focused too much on the negative aspects of her life story, which is comical considering the skewed balance that Back to Black dwells upon. We speed through the good times to wallow in the bad, and without a stronger and more complex portrayal of Amy as a character, it all feels trashy and degrading. It’s harder to feel the heartbreak when the movie is only defining her by our foreknowledge of her death.
Amy never feels like her own person in this movie, which is a shame since she was a dominant presence. We never get into her creative process or her inspirations. We never get to see the person behind the omnipresent tabloid headlines. The formulaic rise-and-fall structure is so rushed and uninterested in fleshing out Amy as a person, so we get simplistic impressions like she sure loved her “nan” (Leslie Manville) and never recovered from her death. The movie sets a midpoint montage where her grandma’s funeral pushes her to get a signature tattoo and beehive hairdo, and it plays like a superhero finally donning their cape and cowl (At last, she has become… Batman, I mean… the Amy We Remember). It’s played so dramatically that it might even unleash a titter or two. There is such scant insight into this woman and her demons that I doubt anyone will come away with a better understanding of Amy and her place in music history, as well as who she was as a person. The movie omits other struggles that might take the focus off its specific topic of drugs and alcohol. Her bulimia gets nary a mention except for maybe one scene where her inconsiderate roommate asks Amy to please vomit into the toilet a little less loudly. While skipping judgment over her enablers, the movie also avoids being too judgemental on the social impulses and rubbernecking that fed upon the harassment and mockery of Winehouse and her struggles. Again, by omission this is placing further blame onto Amy herself.
For each viewer, Back to Black is going to sink or swim depending upon your reaction to Abela’s (Industry) performance. She does her own singing and learned to imitate Winehouse’s signature soaring vocals, so that’s generally impressive. However, I felt her greatest moments of acting were the scenes where she wasn’t in song. Her over-extended enunciation and head bobs made me consistently cringe, like watching an overzealous Vegas impersonator. In the few instances where the movie slows down, that is where Abela is best, being distraught over the loss of her nan, infuriated by her ex, incredulous at music producers that want to market Amy like the Spice Girls, and charmingly innocent confiding to a young fan in a checkout line. If the movie had cut all of her vocal performances and given me more time with this Amy Winehouse, I would have gotten more insight and entertainment. Abela isn’t given the material to really bring Amy to life.
Back to Black isn’t so much Amy’s movie as it is her father Mitch’s response to earlier portrayals. He’s portrayed here as a doting and loving father who only wanted what was best for her. You see, his initial refusal to the demands to send his daughter to rehab was because he wanted her to kick this whole addiction thing on her own. She didn’t want it so he wasn’t going to push her. If anything, he’s the hero of this movie, the proud papa who was let down by his daughter’s duplicitous boyfriend-turned-husband, the man who took his little girl away and turned her to the dark side of drugs. When you analyze the approach, it all comes across as a little insidious, a little icky, and unworthy of recreating this woman’s life experiences to better glorify her father. Abela gives it her all, it’s just too little to be had with Back to Black, a shallow biopic treading upon distaste. I’d recommend skipping this movie entirely, unless you’re irreversibly curious, and watch the 2015 documentary Amy instead. You’ll get a much better sense of Amy Winehouse the singer, the star, the addict, and most importantly, the complicated person.
Nate’s Grade: C
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The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024)
This is my kind of Guy Ritchie, leaning into the pulp sensibilities of genre movies with style, swagger, and cheek, and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is his grand ode to the WWII men-on-a-mission capers. While reportedly based upon the recently divulged secret files of Winston Churchill, the heavily fictionalized account of Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill) assembling a team of experts to blow up Nazi plots treats the men like super heroes. For the first hour or so, the movie is rollicking, with the team mirthfully mowing down Nazis at a steady pace, chumming it up, and having a fine time. It’s only after that midpoint where some of the movie’s flaws start to drag and become more apparent. First of all, an extended mission of getting close to a Head Nazi (Til Sweiger) and abscond with some ships off the coast of Africa makes for a very labored stay but without much fekt in progression or complication. I was feeling wanderlust to get moving. Next, the entire team feels unstoppable to the point of becoming boring. They never break a sweat fighting and casually plow through their enemies, so the entertainment value of the slaughter begins to ebb when it all feels too easy for too long. You can do an entire movie of Nazi destruction from the hands of an unstoppable force, like Sisu, but the bloody appeal of that movie is its creative carnage. We needed more variation in the action and set pieces. These gents have no formidable adversary, no overwhelming odds, and no real bouts of bad luck to thwart them. Alan Ritchson (TV’s Reacher) is a hulking mountain of a man, and he has such poise and charisma to be the breakout character, and Ritchie just fumbles it. Ritchie has excelled in the past with easily imbuing striking and memorable personality and conflicts with his Cockney crime larks, and I was missing more of that peppy style and unique flavor. Don’t get me wrong, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare has great promise and entertainment value, but it unfortunately creates its own ceiling, stalling in the second half and failing to develop intriguing challenges to test its underwritten crew.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Robot Dreams (2023)
What a delightfully tender little movie Robot Dreams proves to be. It’s based on a picture book and its story is mostly about a lonely Dog who orders a build-your-own-robot for companionship and their friendship. Much of the movie hinges on the Robot being trapped on a Long Island beach closed for the season, so our intrepid Dog must go on living in his New York City apartment through the seasons while he waits to rescue his friend. The movie is wordless and based upon a picture book, but that doesn’t mean this is chiefly kid’s stuff. It touches upon the profound with such elegance and efficiency, brilliantly relatable and recognizably human. It’s all about our need for connections, and even when they are separated, both the Dog and Robot find other connections with other characters, and then it comes back to our worry that they won’t actually reunite after being apart for the majority of the movie. I was reading some gay coding between the two as well but maybe that was my own projection. My nine-year-old son was quite taken with the movie and could easily follow along, though he was also very much not a fan of the bittersweet ending, his first taste of providing the whole “what you need, not what you want” conclusion. Robot Dreams is lovingly realized, its animation so clean and crisp with wonderful characters populating an alternative 1980s NYC. It’s simple and sweet and irresistible.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024)
The most terrifying part of The Strangers: Chapter 1 is during its closing seconds, as text appears to inform all of us woeful viewers: “To be continued.” Oh no. Chapter 1 is intended to be the first in a new trilogy bringing back the essential concept of the 2008 home invasion thriller, that the masked attackers have no agenda, no motivation, and are being sadistic silent tormentors just because. The explanation, “Because you were home,” was a key revelation to the original, and here this famous line gets re-worked and has the same clumsy impact as Madame Web trying to reword that Spider-Man oath (“When you take on the responsibility, great power will come“). Not that the dialogue is the strong point of this thriller, with clunky expositional lines as nakedly transparent like, “Today is the third day of our three-day road trip around the country,” followed by, “Or our five-year anniversary.” It’s in the annoying, “Yeah I work here too” kind of lazy exposition. But you’re here for the scares, of which Chapter 1 has precious few because I think these are the most unimpressive and lackadaisical home invaders I’ve ever seen. I think the Wet Bandits might give these goons a run for their money (I’d watch Kevin take on The Strangers). Much of the movie is spent waiting, or checking places around the cabin, sometimes while one intruder plays the piano for ambience. One could make an argument they’re toying with their prey, but I would counter that I just don’t think they’re good at their whole enterprise. It doesn’t help that the main couple are so boring and undeveloped and I found it hard to fear for their well-being. As far as memorable scares or set-pieces or ingenious obstacles or overcoming said obstacles, it’s a big miss on all counts. A home invasion scenario can be exciting and terrifying, and it can be delicious fun to turn the tables on the attackers. This movie has so little that even the core ideas feel stretched beyond their breaking point. It’s hard to even feel much reverence for the original here, as The Strangers: Chapter 1 feels more like the steady, unrelenting squeezing of all IP for any possible drops of renewed audience interest. If this is what Chapter 1 has to offer, please spare us the rest. Fun fact: if you want to know what director Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger) has been doing lately, well here’s your underwhelming answer.
Nate’s Grade: D+
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Hit Man (2024)
Hit Man is a movie that is wonderfully hard to describe. The premise has an easy-to-grasp hook that promises fun and hijinks, but where it goes from there takes on as many transformations as its protagonist, Gary Johnson (Glen Powell). It transforms from a fun game of undercover conning with wigs and silly accents into an unexpected rom-com hinging upon mistaken identity, maintaining assumed appearances, and secrets that then transforms into full film noir without losing its unique identity and the stakes of the character relationships. If you’d expect any filmmaker to pull off that trick, writer/director Richard Linklater has to be one of the best to keep things running smoothly, and that he does, as Hit Man is a crowd-pleasing comedy with some unexpected directions to keep everyone guessing until it lands on its own morally gray terms.
The movie is also, chiefly, a showcase of star and co-writer Powell, a handsome young actor hitting a new ascent of his career with last year’s Anyone But You and the upcoming Twisters. Powell is probably best known as the smirking guy you loved to hate in Top Gun: Maverick, but he’s also played memorable supporting roles in Scream Queens and three other Linklater film projects, notably 2016’s Everybody Wants Some!!, a pseudo-spiritual sequel to the seminal Dazed and Confused. This is Powell’s acting showcase and he’s utterly terrific. He has great infectious fun getting into the various hitman characters, which mostly exist in montages, and trying on different personas and voices. I cackled when he was doing his impression of Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman, and I smiled throughout most of the other personas. It’s easy to see the network TV version of this premise, where every week Gary adopts a new persona and disguise to bust the next possible criminal from hiring a hitman, like an edgier Quantum Leap). The culprits are played like nitwits but then again the police are also played as nitwits (are there THIS many attempted hitman hirings in one city for the police to have a full-time unit?).
But before this acting experiment can get too broad or too redundant, Linklater and Powell switch things up. Around the Act One break is where Gary meets Madison (Adria Arjona), and that’s when everything changes for him and the audience. Now we have emotional stakes, because Gary intervenes to save Madison. While the circumstances of their first meeting involve her wanting to kill her husband and believing Gary as the professional to do such a job, the scene plays as a disarming first date you’d find in another charming romantic comedy, where it’s clear to anyone with a pulse that these two have something together. Instead of busting her for the solicitation, he pushes her to change her mind, take the money and leave her no-good husband rather than finding a questionable man to eliminate him. From there, they form a romantic relationship that fluctuates wildly. She thinks Gary is “Ron,” the suave and confidant persona Gary adopted for their sit-down. So the nerdy tech nerd who teaches philosophy must pretend to be the daring and dangerous man of mystery he wishes he could be. The script doesn’t get carried away with its farcical elements in play, juggling multiple identities for multiple specific audiences, but it asks the question, “Why can’t the milquetoast Gary simply be Ron? Is this an unexpected means of self-actualization for the nerd to win the girl?” Through this extreme exercise, Gary can mold himself into the man he would like to be. The rom-com is flirty, funny, and just as enjoyable as the earlier wacky comedy of being a versatile master of disguise.
It also really helps things when your two lead actors have such strong chemistry. Powell and Arjona (Father of the Bride, Andor) are smoldering together, like full on “get a room already” territory. This lends even more credence when Hit Man makes its next transformation into film noir thriller. I won’t divulge the specific plot elements but it all works with what Linklater has already established. There’s trouble for the both of them, and the question becomes how far is each participant willing to go to stay above the fray. The transition from silly costume comedy to sundry noir thriller is handled so naturally, as if the characters, already existing under such unique circumstances, found themselves in the elevated movie-movie version of their crazy relationship. Rather than feel contrived, Linklater and Powell have put in the work to make these twists and turns credible and exciting. The shifting nature of the movie is a wonderful reflection of its fake hitman hero. There’s a scene late in the film, where all of our principal players have come together, and you have characters saying one thing, intimating another, for different versions of different audiences, and it’s such a masterful tonal dance that feels satisfying as a climactic turning point as well as genuinely impressive for all the myriad subtext in play.
This is a clear-cut case of a movie being “inspired by” a true story rather than being “based on” a true story. Generally, we expect the “based on” stories to have some voracity to reality. We accept that there will be alterations for dramatic purposes, externalizing the internal, condensing timelines and characters into a more accessible structure, etc. If you go to a movie about Jackie Robinson, you don’t expect to see the famous baseball slugger fighting space monsters (“Racism was the real giant monster all along”). Hit Man is based upon a 2001 long-form news article by Texas Monthly journalist Skip Hollandsworth, the same author of the source material for Linklater’s fascinating true crime dark comedy gem, 2011’s Bernie, which I highly recommend (a career-best Jack Black). The real Gary Johnson really did pose as a fake hitman for the purposes of catching real criminals, but the rest of the movie exists in its own fictional universe of dramatic complications. Usually we want our film stories to have more fidelity with the truth and reality, but I’m glad Linklater and Powell recognized the sheer storytelling potential of this quirky premise. Sticking to the facts could have told an amusing story, but feeling confident to take bold leaps with well-worn genre motifs, when called for, is the right call for making the most of this tale.
The shame of Hit Man is how quickly it will likely be subsumed by Netflix’s suffocating tidal waves of content. Here is a fun, likable, and surprising indie comedy with definite mass appeal buoyed by great performances, clever writing, and a tonally shifting narrative to keep things fresh. Powell gets the breakout showcase he deserves and we get one of the most unexpected and amusing rom-coms of recent years. Hit Man is a movie that deserves to be seen, to be enjoyed with a crowd, but I worry it will get lost in the shuffle of streaming titles. I suppose this might just be the current reality for fans of mid-level adult dramas and comedies. At least they have a home on the streaming networks even if these movies would have been theatrical breakouts years ago. Regardless, Hit Man is a good time with good people pretending to be bad, or is it bad people pretending to be good, but whatever pretense, it’s a charming winner worth your two hours.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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The Last Stop in Yuma County (2024)
As a general rule of thumb, if some movie is described as “Coen-esque,” I must watch it. The Last Stop in Yuma County is a blend of Coen darkly comic malevolence, as well as Tarantino’s knack for the menace of dramatic irony and boiling tension waiting to explode, and it’s a firecracker of a debut for writer/director Francis Gallupi. It’s a relatively contained tale, sticking mostly to one rustic roadside diner and gas station along the dusty Arizona byways. On this day, two of its patrons happen to be recent bank robbers on the run, and they’re holding the other diner patrons captive until the gas pumps get fixed to fuel up and escape. The first hour then becomes a dread-filled game of waiting for things to go very badly. Our two main characters, a traveling knife salesman (Jim Cummings) and a waitress (Joceline Donahue) who happens to be the wife of the town sheriff, are working together to try and elicit help without endangering their lives, all the time more people keep entering the diner and inadvertently joining the simmering hostage situation. The way Gallupi writes his different characters is sharp and efficient, and the dread compounds in such organic complications, showing how fiendishly well-developed he’s made his potboiler. It also has a clear eye for style. Around the Act Two break, the movie becomes something else, which it intimated through a very specific film reference in conjunction with a specific character reference. It still proves compelling, but the overall sense of darkness and tragedy wore me down a little by the end. By the conclusion of its 90 minutes, I was hearing the saintly voice of Marge Gunderson in my head, shaking her head at the preventable body count and bad choices (“And all for a little bit of money. There’s more to life than money, don’cha know?”). The Last Stop in Yuma County is a twisty and twisted little macabre morality play in the guise of familiar Coen-esque capers. Welcome to the big leagues, Gallupi.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Van Helsing (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released May 7, 2004:
Crossover movies have a distasteful history in the world of cinema. Some movie exec gets the notion, “Hey, why can’t two great tastes taste great together?” But what we’re left with is usually uninspired (The Flintstones Meet the Jetsons notwithstanding). Crossovers for horror movies are the worst of the lot. For every Freddy vs. Jason there’s a dud, like 1966’s Jesse James meets Frankenstein’s Daughter. That year went down in the annals of cinematic history, however, as it also gave us Billy the Kid versus Dracula, marking two entries in the expanding genre of cowboys battling famous monsters (as far as I know, this genre still stands at two movies). So what can one expect from Van Helsing, a big-budget creature feature that includes Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman?
Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman and a really big hat) is a secret soldier for a covert order of the Vatican. This covert order dispatches monsters and creepy-crawlies the world over. He’s been ordered to assist Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale), the last in a Romanian family line that has sought to kill the infamous Dracula (Richard Roxburgh). It seems that their family line is dwindling. And Anna’s brother being turned into a werewolf doesn’t help the situation. If her family line dies before Dracula then they cannot enter heaven. Van Helsing comes to town to help out the locals who are terrorized by Dracula’s flying brides. Van Helsing effectively kills one of the vamp ladies and is celebrated as a hero by the village. As he gets closer to Anna he also learns more about his own mysterious past and his connection to a certain figure with big teeth.
The Big D has a dastardly plan. He wants to find Frankenstein’s monster (Shuler Hensley) to channel enough power through him to awaken zillions of goo-sacks harboring the vamp’s undead brood. Of course, Frankenstein’s monster isn’t too keen on this. Together, he and Van Helsing, with the help of Anna as well as a comic relief monk, battle to stop Dracula from unleashing his children of the night.
Van Helsing is stupid, stupid, stupid. Director Stephen Sommers exists in his own indulgent world where bigger is better and some CGI spackle will fix any plot holes. He makes check-your-brain-at-the-door popcorn movies, but a “popcorn movie” is no excuse to forgive a rambling, incoherent, loud, stupid mess. I liked the first Mummy flick and even found some good with the second, but Van Helsing is Sommers at his rock-bottom worst, gorging on a trough of special effects and vomiting the results onto the big screen. Sommers’ idea of character development is knocking people through walls like they were in a Looney Tunes cartoon.
Van Helsing raises some interesting questions, like why do Dracula’s brides morph into flying demons that are conveniently genitalia-free? Why does a werewolf rolling over the top of a carriage somehow cause it to catch on fire? Why does Dracula keep his magic lycanthropy cure in the open? It doesn’t matter. Van Helsing is so straight-laced about its absurdities that questioning them will just get tiresome.
Not that you would expect much, but the acting in Van Helsing is bad. Beckinsale’s accent couldn’t be less convincing if her role were played by Charo. The trio of Dracula’s brides are played by swimsuit models and let me just say their performance is on par with what you would expect from swimsuit models. Roxburgh is quite possibly the worst vampire in the modern history of vampires, and that includes Blacula, Count Chocula and Tom Cruise. He couldn’t look any less sinister if he was in a diaper and bonnet. What’s up with those strands of hair that dangle in his face? Why do the Van Helsing creators want their Prince of Evil and son of Satan to look like he was the keyboardist for some 80s pop synth band?
This overly long film feels like a seven-year-old’s book report that he hasn’t read: it’s like a child is making this up as they go. “And then … a werewolf pops up … and then Dracula’s flying brides … and then they all need Frankenstein’s monster ….” Seriously, were the penning this script on the fly? It’s a $150 million improv film. The reels of the film could be switched around and no one would be able to tell the difference. Van Helsing is one long, exasperated action sequence that drags its heels instead of wowing. It beats the audience into submission with its stupidity and redundancy.
The entertainment level of Van Helsing is exceedingly weak. It runs an eternity, which wouldn’t be a problem if one were intrigued by the story, the characters, or the action sequences. The action could have been suitable but Sommers has gotten less reliant on the physical and more superfluous with his CGI. Watching a CGI monstrosity smash into a CGI monstrosity before a CGI background where no semblance of reality is present grows tiresome after 130 minutes. The effects are passable, but they overload the viewer and numb whatever slight interest may have existed for the classic monsters.
What should have been a clever homage turns instead into a hollow marketing ploy that’s so frenetic and tireless with its manic pacing and bad special effects. Even the many attempts at humor are flat. It has to be some kind of apocalyptic sign that Hellboy and now Van Helsing have been unleashed unto the innocents of this world. Some will find Van Helsing decent popcorn entertainment, but most will grow weary of its sloppy design and wafer-thin substance. For me, this is one to avoid, period. There isn’t an ounce of fun to be had while sitting through the painful pair of hours that is Van Helsing. This is one monster mash that’s a real monster mess.
Nate’s Grade: D
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
In 2004, Van Helsing was being primed to be not just a blockbuster but the forerunner for a new interconnected franchise revitalizing the classic Universal horror icons. Director Stephen Sommers was hot off the success of the first two Mummy movies, Hugh Jackman had become a household name playing everyone’s favorite growling superhero, and Kate Beckinsale had proven her own box-office mettle fighting vampires and werewolves in the Underworld series. The studio was expecting so much that it planned a sequel, a TV series on NBC called Transylvania, an animated prequel, a clothing line, a video game, maybe even theme park additions, and to maintain the Eastern European sets so that they could be utilized for the eventual show and sequels. Obviously, this never came to pass, and Sommers’ last big Hollywood action movie was the 2009 G.I. Joe movie, and he hasn’t directed a movie since 2013’s Odd Thomas adaptation. He chose not to direct the third Mummy movie in 2008, but it seems like this man’s career has never been the same since Van Helsing cratered in the summer of 2004. It began as the studio asking Sommers for even more monster movies, Sommers pitching them all together as an Avengers-style super movie, the studio getting carried away with larger plans of franchise dominance, and then when it didn’t materialize, a promising popcorn filmmaker in the highest blockbuster sphere just vanished in a poof of overzealous CGI.
Me wife’s crush circa 2004
In 2004, I did not like Van Helsing. That might be too charitable a description. I wrote in my original review, “Van Helsing is stupid, stupid, stupid. [Sommers] exists in his own indulgent world where bigger is better and some CGI spackle will fix any plot holes. He makes check-your-brain-at-the-door popcorn movies, but a ‘popcorn movie’ is no excuse to forgive a rambling, incoherent, loud, stupid mess.” It was one of my worst movies of 2004, and twenty years later, I’ve mostly come around on the movie. I won’t tell you that it’s a great movie, or even achieves that same magic alchemy of action-adventure swash buckle that The Mummy brought back to major studio filmmaking in 1999, but Van Helsing is enjoyably ridiculous schlock nonsense. It was also one of my wife’s favorite movies growing up, and she reminded me that her teenage self had a big crush on Richard Roxburgh’s version of Dracula, not Hugh.
I now view Van Helsing less as a horror monster action vehicle and more of a spy vehicle in a strange world. The titular Van Helsing is our secret agent complete with spy gadgets with his comedic relief sidekick, and he’s got his important missions and the sexy Bond Girl, and the villains and betrayals and added back-story that doesn’t seem even necessary. It’s Sommers taking the structure of a spy thriller and supplanting it onto a Victorian-era monster steampunk universe of demons and centuries-old church conspiracies. Jackman is enjoyably suave as the Vatican’s favorite killing machine learning his own life lessons about the nature of legacy. I even enjoyed the villain’s motivation for Dracula; he’s trying to learn the secrets of Dr. Frankenstein’s reanimation to ensure that his vampy babies survive. Here is a Dracula who is bereft because he cannot father living children. I suppose there could be further discussion over the different forms of life as converting humans into vampires is itself a rebirth. Perhaps the distinction is like the difference between having biological children and adopted children. Maybe dear old Drac just wants to have a bundle of joy he can call his own. That’s more interesting than versions that make him out to be some stalker ex-boyfriend. Likewise, the role of Anna (Beckinsale) is given more pathos than simply being the Strong Romani Badass. While her wardrobe consists of corsets and teased hair to appeal to a young male demo, her character’s mission is powerful and personal. Anna needs to kill Dracula not to save herself but to ensure the rest of her deceased family members can enter heaven. Talk about cumulative family guilt. That’s heavy. When her face appears in the clouds at the end like Mufasa, it’s a confirmation of generational rest. That’s an arc that’s more fulfilling than being any love interest that would be discarded later.
As soon as it got rolling, I said to my wife that this was going to go one of two ways: Van Helsing will learn that his organization is not as righteous as he believed them to be, manipulating him to eliminate threats to the organization’s standing rather than threats to humanity; or Dracula and Van Helsing have a personal connection that hasn’t been fully examined. Dear reader, it went in both directions because Sommers is slapping so many plot elements to make this movie feel full to bursting like a bloated tick. There’s ideas stacked upon ideas here, references and unexplored plot points for an untapped universe (vampires started werewolves?). An hour in, all of Dracula’s bats, a.k.a. his children have been slain, and you may erroneously think the movie is over. Well, there’s a whole other castle to explore with even more baby bats to kill. The last hour operates on pure video game mechanics of, go here, grab this item, battle this mini-boss. There’s definitely a level of redundancy and a “more is more” kitchen sink excess philosophy, but the bombast is part of his general appeal. There’s a touch of Sam Raimi here, a touch of Michael Bay; schlock with sheen. Maybe it was my nostalgia goggles, or maybe I was just attuning to Sommers’ wavelength, but the movie worked for me much better in 2024 as I was now charmed by its goofball sensibilities and less irritated by its over-plotted script.
You feel the admirable passion that Sommers has for this universe, adopting stylish pastiches to celebrate the older movies and lore, but definitely bringing his more modern sensibilities to the forefront. There’s a certain chaotic energy that animates Sommers big movies, bringing these classic characters together to run amok and crash into each other. That little kid’s imagination given the whole sandbox to play in can be enviable and lively, and it can also lead into unexpected directions that unexpectedly go nowhere. The incorporation of Frankenstein’s monster (Shuler Hensely) is more a plot device than a thoughtful character to bring to the team. He’s the magical MacGuffin both sides are fighting to claim for their own. Van Helsing’s major crime is trying too much and being too straight-laced about its silly. It’s not winking to the audience, it’s not self-commenting on its absurdities, it’s just living them lavishly. In 2004, I couldn’t appreciate that and this movie, and now I can find a place in my heart for such fun.
My original review in 2004 is scathing, with ready-to-blurb snark trying to communicate the intensity of my distaste. The line that Sommers is “gorging on a trough of special effects and vomiting the results onto the big screen” sticks with me. I’m surprised I restrained myself from making a “Van Helsing sucks” comment. Several of my criticisms about the acting, the confusing rules, the convoluted storytelling are entirely valid, but they just don’t bother me enough twenty years later. I can relax and enjoy the movie because it is a mess. That doesn’t mean every flawed movie deserves kindly dismissing its faults if it doesn’t aspire to anything other than mass entertainment. Big movies for big audiences can still be big bad. I think Van Helsing’s appeal is how sloppy it is and how excessive every element plays. In another universe, a… “dark universe” to borrow a phrase that came to me for no reason, this could have kicked off the interconnected Universal monster movies (any reference to Egyptian mummies is absent, implying perhaps that Sommers earlier movies exist in a shared world). It was not to be, and Sommers’ career has never been the same since, which is a real shame. The blockbuster space needs a filmmaker like Sommers, a man nimble enough to juggle tones and childlike glee with darker humor. Come back, Stephen Sommers, and maybe try your hand at the Creature From the Black Lagoon while you’re at it.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Atlas (2024)
In the world of Netflix releases, it’s hard to judge what is gauged as a success. Take for instance their new sci-fi action movie Atlas. It cost the streaming giant $100 million and they now tout it as being the top movie across the globe on their platform. This could very well be true, though Netflix has long been cagey about sharing their viewing numbers, instead preferring to go with the, “Hey, just trust us, okay?” defense, which hasn’t exactly been reassuring in an era where bonuses are linked to number hits. With the ever-expanding catalog of titles, being a reported hit on Netflix can sometimes feel like being, say, Homecoming Queen from 1989, an accomplishment soon eclipsed and forgotten. What was the last big Netflix action movie that had cultural staying power, that caused people to continue to discuss weeks or months later? Netflix swears their most-watched movie is 2021’s Red Notice, a star-laden breezy adventure caper that I challenge anyone to remember much about besides its stars. This is the challenge of gaining traction in a world of near endless content choices. Atlas is an above average film benefiting from a strong character dynamic at its core even if the rest of its story elements feel forgettably disposable.
Atlas (Jennifer Lopez) is a data analyst who has also helped develop Earth’s orbital security system. An A.I. program/robot named Harlan (Simu Liu) was born from Atlas’ mother, and then Harlan went and murdered millions of humans. The killer robot fled Earth with his robotic followers and Earth has been awaiting his return for decades. Atlas joins a mission to land on a distant planet where they think Harlan has operated as his base. However, Atlas must work with an A.I. program inside her mech suit that calls itself Smith. In order for them both to survive in this new world, they must work together.
I found everything within the mech suit of Atlas to be engaging and dynamic, and everything that happens outside that giant suit to be underdeveloped and mediocre. I was genuinely surprised how Atlas essentially becomes a buddy survival movie. It’s the human who is distrustful of accepting help from others and especially from advanced technology with a mind of its own, and an A.I. program that is trying to improve its capabilities by getting to know its user and learning how to grow from her. They need each other to survive and that requires a trust and relationship to be fostered, and it’s a surefire enjoyable plot to watch two enemies become allies and maybe even friends over the course of their united struggles. The growth between them also feels relatively organic, coming at a natural progression with personal insights and offerings without clunky leading dialogue lines, like, “So why don’t you trust robots, huh?” This dynamic reminded me a bit of 2004’s I, Robot where Will Smith played a detective who hates robots who has to work with a robot and the two of them form a bond (there are other similarities I’ll get to later). Much of the movie takes place within a three-foot window from the capsule inside this mech suit, and the shared struggle between Atlas and Smith is the heart of the movie, and it’s actually quite good. Both of these characters find ways to surprise one another, both of them shed preconceptions, and both of them will discover the lengths they go to protect the other even if it puts their own existence in question. As a story about a woman and her robot, Atlas is a fun and fairly involving sci-fi buddy movie adventure.
Now, the world building and story that gets Atlas to this alien world, and the escalating stakes of world destruction are where the movie dissipates into an amorphous cloud of sci-fi action keywords. I don’t know why it had to be killer terrorist robots that brought out Atlas and her team of mech-suited warriors to this foreign planet. The reason why the characters are stranded on this unknown planet is unimportant. It could just as likely be a science team exploring a potential new habitable world for an Earth burning through its natural resources too quickly. It could be exploring the remnants of a possible alien civilization. It could even simply be the closest planet available during a distress from their spaceship going down for whatever mechanical or orbital obstruction. The story is about the relationship between the human being and the robot/A.I. working together to survive in an unfamiliar and hostile land.
The robot insurrection feels like an acceptable plot device but it’s so under-explored until the movie needs to dramatically escalate the stakes into an apocalyptic cataclysmic scale. The fact that Harlan, which let’s agree is a terrible name for the villain of your movie, determines that the best way to save humanity is to annihilate humanity is already a tragically familiar refrain we’ve heard from numerous sci-fi villains, from The Hunger Games to Infinity War to The Day the Earth Stood Still to even I, Robot. In that last movie, the A.I. system determines the only way to protect humanity is through controlling and ultimately eliminating them, and this same motivation comes to Harlan. This character is introduced as our Big Bad through an opening montage, he disappears, and then only comes back at the end to be a force to threaten Earth. The entire robot uprising is so tremendously underwritten that the movie doesn’t even do the barest whiff of ambiguity to question whether humanity has been mistreating its robot servant class. Instead, Harlan is introduced right away as a terrorist figure and stays true to this characterization. I thought that Act Three would be upending for Atlas, where she learns the robots were framed or at least the conflict is more nuanced and her “side” might be more culpable than the military’s cover story. Nope. Evil Robot King is simply Evil Robot King. Fine, he’s a boring killbot, but then why go to such lengths to provide a personal connection for Atlas and Harlan. It’s unnecessary when she has to stop the killer robot from killing the Earth; we don’t need a personal connection for this to work. The level of personal guilt attached to Atlas is ridiculous, including multiple levels of tragedy that feel far too overwrought. Atlas didn’t need to feel guilty over her involvement in developing Evil Robot King as a child; she could have been simply the daughter to the woman who unintentionally brought this killer tech forward, or she could have simply been a woman who experienced a tragedy linked to the robot uprising without having a mom who developed the technology. She could just be a victim. She doesn’t have to be the first victim.
Atlas is really a one woman show, so your feelings of Lopez (Hustlers) as an actress will dominate how you feel about the overall experience. I don’t know if Atlas is made substantially better with her as the lead actress but she certainly performs ably and doesn’t seem left unmoored by the fact that she’s talking to a voice in an empty space for most of her months filming. Lopez has a determination that gives her action novice character an underlying strength to tap into upon the call of action.
As a sci-fi action spectacle, the blockbuster aspects are sufficient for our casual entertainment fulfillment. The special effects and action are pretty solid under director Brad Peyton (San Andreas, Rampage) who knows his way assuredly around effects-heavy spectacle (he was also co-creator of the delightfully daffy 2019 Netflix apocalyptic series Daybreak). Much of the movie takes place within one mech suit, but I never felt a sense of visual claustrophobia thanks to the buddy dynamic and Peyton’s use of space. The big action sequences at the end have their share of impressive cool moments, but they also benefit from coming at the end of a character relationship that has helped to make the action more satisfying. I do lament the modern trend of filming on such large green screens or LED stages that lighting is always the same bright overhead setting without significant variance with shadows and other light sources.
If you’re looking for a Netflix action movie to divert your attention, or even barely pay attention to, then you could do far worse than Atlas. It might even hold your attention and keep you engaged thanks to the fun buddy film dynamic that serves as its foundation. There are plenty of elements that feel tacked on, underdeveloped, or blandly familiar, but the core works and Atlas is worth a couple hours of escapism.
Nate’s Grade: B
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