Film, Box Office, and Stuff

So this is my ninth Nicolas Cage film of the year. If this is not a spoof (it's not a spoof), then the filmmakers might be retarded. This is hilariously bad. I'm talking In The Blood and The Asylum's The Terminators -level of bad. In the future, the post-Trump Utopian United States is now led by a fascist government in which one government agency, The Humanity Bureau, regulates the contribution citizens make to society. Basically, they send people that take more than they contribute to a place called "New Eden". Little do these people know that they are being sent to their death. They kill them Auschwitz-style, then burn them, put them in boxes and pallet them up for some reason. The government keep people in the US and in the cities with fear. Instead of building a wall to keep people out and Americans in the cities, they have concocted lies, such as that radiation is strong along the borders, there are no longer roads that lead north, rivers/lakes have all...

I've never really agreed with the notion of mindless fun, but it is certainly present with Rampage .  It is a hollow monster-destruction flick that feels like it was written by the same people as Power Rangers .  The script is pretty generic, Dwayne Johnson is irritatingly more wooden than usual, and the villains are two-dimensional misfires.  On the flip-side, it's saving grace if you will ... there is a bunch of big, CGI monster fights, and I don't care what anyone says, they're fun to observe.  Not exciting or moving in any other way (apart from the short-lived final battle), but it's always at least visually interesting to behold these clashes.  There are also some comedic attempts, only two of which actually work (both are the gorilla's hand gestures).  The film jumps into gear pretty much as soon as it begins, and before you know it, it has ended. Not a lot of time for development. There is nothing outright terrible, but a lot of forgettable charac...

This CG-actioner is the best film in the Lara Croft film series.  It has plenty of action and "kineticism" to the plot and sequences, and Alicia Vikander is fantastic.  She goes through hell, but is made for this role. She is naive yet strong, and supremely sexy.  It is basically an origin story, because while she does do lots of typical tomb raider-y stuff, she is also a bit young and stupid. I love the set up for the sequel, and very much hope it gets made.  This could be a great franchise. But as fun as it was, it leaves a lot for sequels to mine, which hurts this first effort.  There are too many night sequences. The shipwreck, the nightfall fight where Lara drowns a guard, and the entire ending inside the tomb were all difficult to follow.  The Hong Kong chase and the waterfall sequence were far-and-away the better set pieces.  Also, while there was a bit of tomb raiding and solving puzzles, there needed to be way more of this, and I feel it wa...