Reviews

Taika Waititi continues to show he can bring the funny. The problem is he's bringing the funny to a script with breast cancer, deicide, mass murder, and which *starts* with a child dying of thirst in a desert. And you can feel that tonal clash echoing through the whole movie.

Thor's intelligence seems to get ratcheted down another notch. The screaming goat meme wasn't that funny 10 years ago and doesn't do well as nostalgia humor today. The Guardians of the Galaxy are only around long enough to be gotten rid of. I don't like that Jane gets Mjolnir, not from being worthy, but because of Thor once telling it to look after her.

On the plus side, it is nice to see Natalie Portman back. I liked they gave her a bit of a silly side too. Seeing New Asgard as a tourist trap was a hoot. A better telling of how Jane and Thor broke up. Christian Bale delivers a sympathetic villain who manages to not be one note. And the final battle with the empowered kids was great.

It left me with 2 big questions.

1) In Endgame, Thor brought a duplicate of Mjolnir back from the past. What happened to that?

2) Up till now, the MCU has seemed to say that Asgardians are an advanced alien race. But now we learn they are "gods." That "gods" are a separate class of entities? And all Earth gods are real? That seems... problematic, from a storytelling perspective.

This is one of the most faithful renditions of the original Dickens Story that I've seen. Almost all the dialog is taken verbatim from the book and the settings mesh easily. The 3d effects are, for the most part, enjoyable (although I find them to be most effective in creating an illusion of depth, not when they make things come out of the screen.) The design of the Ghosts was well done. The appearance of the Ghost of Christmas Future was wonderfully eerie. And Present was wonderful. Past looked good, but its "flickering" physicality got a bit distracting.

Jim Carey performs admirably in this. His Scrooge is spot on and has none of the Jim Carey mugging that I was afraid of. His performance as the Ghosts is also enjoyable though some may be put out by the choice of accent for the Ghost of Christmas Present.

The other voice actors did well also. I didn't realize until the credits that Carey was not the only one wearing multiple hats.

My biggest problems with this version were where it departed from the original story in the interest of spectacular visuals. The scene shown in the ads where Scrooge is riding the Ghost of Past's hat like a rocket is one such example but the most gratuitous example was the carriage chase scene with the Ghost of Christmas Future. It came from nowhere, added nothing to the story, and frankly distracted from the movie. It was like there was this five minute interruption in the movie where the animators showed off before going back to the story.

Still, it was overall positive and a nice start to the Holiday season.

First off, I think we can all agree now that Hayden Christiensen's lackluster performance in Star Wars was not just a result of Lucas's ham-handed directing. His wooden, unbelievable performance in this movie almost tips it from poor to unwatchable. But even with that aside the movie never overcomes its fundamental flaws. Its pacing is horrendous, the exposition is confusing, and the action sequences are jumping around so much they are impossible to follow. The movie starts out well, with the boy's discovery of his abilities and learning to control them. But once Hayden and Samuel Jackson meet, things shift into another gear and leave the audience behind. We are not supposed to understand, merely be enchanted by the pretty pictures. The motivations behind Jamie Bell's character are thrown away over the shoulder and cheapen him. The function of the Paladins' weapons is unclear. (If he just jumps from place to place, how did the cable get buried in the wall that one time?) The Jumpers' fighting is clearly designed to show off the special effect rather than to win the fight. The parts where they try to space out the information (notably the truth about David's mother) fail miserably. Yet, I still found the *idea* of the movie interesting and might try reading the book it is based off of. I found myself wondering if this wouldn't have worked better as a "Fugitive"- style TV series, rather than a movie. The we could have had information parse out to us over weeks rather than trying to cram it into a ridiculously short movie.

I kept hearing how Jamie Foxx was supposed to be so good in this movie.. I guess it's because he dies halfway in and seems less dirty than the other actors in comparison.

This movie is about showing futuristic planes flying fast, or it should be because that's all it does right. First off there's the casting: you ever notice that whenever there's a cast of three and the movie wants to be "diverse," they cast a white woman, a black man, and a white guy who's the leader? The characters are as predicable as a B.C. punch line and with all the warmth. Given that, I can't believe I was actually surprised when Foxx's character died early on. I mean if they're going to be cliché in every aspect, the black guy's gotta die early, right?

Jessica Beil is the Navy's top female pilot and groomed for stardom. This is supposed to explain why we see Foxx and Lucas's characters mackin' it up with the honeys at the beginning, while she wades through the party like an indulgent nun, smiling benignly at the antics of lesser mortals. That a female pilot could rise to her level and not act like "one of the boys" is one of the more unbelievable aspects of the movie.

Lucas's character is every fighter movie hero you've ever seen rolled into one and strained through a personality filter. His big character point? He's in love with Beil's character, but won't "ruin her chances" by getting in a relationship. Apparently, only holy virgins can be top fighter pilots.

Then there's the "villain." The super-robot-plane that goes crazy and has to be brought down- EDI. It's reasons for doing so are so artificial that you've got to wonder what the writers were thinking. It's created to supplement the anti-terrorism fighter task-force (Yeah, that'll stop a guy with a backpack full of C4 – a cool plane.) The plane decides that a little disobedience is acceptable after watching the Lucas's character disobey an order, so it decides it will take out the "enemy," a Russian target that doesn't exist. It's bad enough as it is. Then, in the greatest dues ex machina moviedom has ever created, the killer plane is injured and has to be guided in for repairs where it (get this) feels guilty over the deaths it has caused! Meanwhile Beil's plane went down over North Korea (Quick, get a globe and figure out how likely it is she'd be over North Korea when her plane failed!) So EDI and Lucas have to escape the crooked government guys sent to kill them to cover up the mission failure. With Lucas flying away in the cockpit that they never explain why was even built into EDI in the first place! This was the worst aspect of the movie for me. We'd been set up for this tight, paranoid, HAL-like movie, and then BAM! When did it turn into Knight Rider?

Overall: Really bad! If you want funny though, keep an eye peeled for David Andrews. He plays a shadowy politician behind the project. You can tell he's shadowy, by the fact that he's never fully lit in the film. It's like he asked his agent to keep his face from appearing in this gawd-awful movie. Save you movie fare, folks. Or go see "The Island" instead.