I admire it, but I'm hardpressed to say that I liked it.
It reminds me a lot of Donnie Darko in that it is a relentlessly imaginative movie that really doesn't know what to do with all of its ideas, or be able to accept that maybe not all of the ideas need to be in the movie in the first place. And it really doesn't execute on those ideas well in a lot of ways.
For example: the big…
I don't think there's an action director who fells as hard from grace as John Woo did. I mean, his early Hong Kong career produced some of the greatest action movies ever, ones which are still being copied today like The Killer and Hard Boiled. Then he comes to America and his ceiling there is basically "moderately entertaining average action movie." (Some people think Face/Off is a classic. They are wrong. It is a cheesy mediocrity.)
Mission: Impossible II is…
It's been at least two decades since I last watched it, and I had privately held the idea in my head for a long time that it was an inferior initial installment of what is now probably my favorite non-fantasy-genre action movie franchise, mostly because I think Brian De Palma is one of the truly overrated directors in film history. Seriously, everybody will talk about Blow Out but he has made so much shit: Snake Eyes, Casualties of War, The…
As Hollywood studio comedies go, it's harder to manage better than what GAME NIGHT achieves at this point. By this I mean that there's nothing terribly surprising about it - I mean, Jason Bateman at one point actively references how studio comedies like GAME NIGHT always throw in callbacks to the main characters' personal crises that run alongside the plot of the film to distract viewers from the fact that they're running that same formula again - but it's really…
