movie reviews – The Movie Chronicles

Serenity

The movie Serenity, which stars Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway, is one roller coaster of a movie from start to finish. It is a movie that grapples with the concept of right versus wrong and the concept or real and not real. Despite hearing numerous mixed reviews about the movie, I decided to go see it for myself and see what it was all about. While the movie is bizarre, I am glad that I went to see the movie for myself to form my own opinion on it – because if you like authentically unusual movies, then this one is for you.

Summary:

Baker Dill (McConaughey) is the captain of fishing boat that takes tourists out on the open see off of the peaceful island known as Plymouth Island. He appears to be living a quiet and routine lifestyle, however, that is all shattered when his ex-wife, Karen (Hathaway) manages to track him down and reaches out to him with a plea of help. She begs Baker to save her, and their son, Patrick, from her new and abusive husband named Frank by taking him out to sea for a fishing excursion and only to kill him and feed his body to the sharks. The sudden appearance of Karen forces Baker back into a life that he has gone through great lengths to put behind him and forget about, and he begins to struggle between what is right and what is wrong while his world is thrown into a reality that may not be what is seems.

Review:

The movie has a huge plot-twist midway through that ultimately destroys all of the dramatic tension that was created throughout the first half of the film once you realize that nothing that happens to the characters or within the story matters. The plot twist was that McConaughey’s character, Baker Dill died in Iraq while serving his country and that the entire plot of the movie is actually a video game that his son, Patrick created as a means of escaping the harsh reality of his and his mother’s situation with the abusive stepfather. The video game element became more evident once the dialogue from the smaller characters became more stiff, which caused them to feel more like non-playable characters (NPCs). While the plot twist is a clever variation of an old trick, it unfortunately reduces the rest of the movie into an intellectual exercise.

Contrary to the negative reviews I have heard about the movie, I rather liked it – though the plot was sort of collapsing in on itself and unnecessarily confusing to follow. The main reason I liked the movie is because it is one of those movies that you need to watch several times to catch all of the details that indicate what the plot twist is going to be. In fact, thinking back on the movie, there were a number of little moments and details that were pointing to the twist of the false reality.

Another reason I liked the movie is because it did not end how I thought it was going to. I tend to enjoy movies that do not end how you think they are going to. About one-third of the way through the movie, I began to suspect the Baker Dill was not alive but I did not expect the movie to end with Patrick stabbing his abusive stepfather in an act of self-defense for himself and his mother.

Overall, I give the movie a solid 3/5 because I appreciate what it was attempting to do with its major plot twist. The thing holding it back from a higher rating from me is because its plot twist was not executed as well as it could have been in my opinion. Instead of it being made known half way through the movie that the reality the characters are in is not real, it should have been saved for closer to the end of the movie.

Bad Match

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The Netflix movie Bad Match is listed as a scary and suspenseful movie. What it should have been listed as is downright awful.

The movie is about a guy named Harris who uses a knock off version of Tinder called Head Over Heels to have one night stands with women. He is a self-absorbed individual who does not care about anyone’s feelings but his own. He matches with a girl named Riley Miller who ends up getting quite attached to Harris after their night of passion. He tries to ignore her, but she keeps trying to contact him through text, phone call, and his work phone. When he tells her that he does not feel the same, she pretends to attempt suicide to get him to come over to her house. When he gets there, and tries to get her to come to, she opens her eyes. She then says, “Gotcha!”. He tells her that what she did was messed up, and then tells her to never contact him again. From there, his life begins to spiral out of control. He gets fired from his job for posting negative tweets about his job on Twitter, and he claims that he did not post them. Additionally, he gets arrested because there was child pornography found on his laptop, which he also claims to not have downloaded. He gets arrested, and is told by his lawyer to plead guilty (where he could potentially get off with a fine). Harris insists that he did not download anything of that sort. His friend bails him out of jail. From here, things become hectic, disorganized, and ridiculous. He tries to get Riley to confess to hacking his account, and to downloading the child pornography. He goes to great lengths to do this. He even creates a fake identity to contact her after she filed a restraining order against him. He kidnaps Riley, and holds her hostage at his former workplace. They get into an altercation, and long story short, he kills her. The final scene is him getting a phone call from his lawyer saying that he is off the hook for the charges because someone he trash talked online during a video game was the one who hacked his Twitter, and downloaded child pornography on his computer. A security guard sees him sitting next to the dead body, and calls for back up.

There were a lot of things I disliked about this movie. One of them is how quickly everything escalates. Everything happens at an unusually fast pace, and goes from 0 – 100 at the drop of a hat. The second thing I disliked was that the character named Riley faked a suicide attempt to get Harris to come over to her house to check on her. That is beyond messed up, and sheds a negative light on mental illness. Additionally, it says to people that those who attempt suicide are either joking about it, or trying to get attention. It is messed up, and should not have happened. A third thing I disliked was that someone essentially ruined Harris’s life over a small insult exchanged online through a video game. It was small in the grand scheme of things. The consequences of not only Harris’s actions, but also the insulted gamer’s actions ruined two people’s lives. A fourth thing I disliked was that Harris took matters into his own hands, and killed Riley. He should have left things up to the authorities and his lawyer. If he hadn’t jumped to conclusions, Riley wouldn’t be dead, and he would have been off the hook eventually.

There was not much that I liked about the movie. I liked how his friends called Harris out on his shenanigans. They told him he was using the girls he matched with on Head Over Heels for sex without any regard for their feelings.

Overall, it is not the best movie on Netflix. I suggest the next time you are going to watch something on Netflix that you swipe left on Bad Match. One thing that I can say for sure is that it is still a better love story than Twilight.

KAYoung

Flatliners — Flatlined — DNR

“It’s a great day to die!” – Jamie, the evening he was flatlined

If you have intentions of watching the 2017 remake of Flatliners, I highly suggest that you reconsider and re-evaluate your movie options. The box-office failure stars some well-known actors and actresses such as Ellen Page (Juno) and Diego Luna (Rogue One), had a $19-million budget (made $2-million opening weekend), and scored a solid 2% on Rotten Tomatos. Unfortunately, they did little to contribute to the movie’s success or to shock it back to life to unfold and showcase an interesting and complex story line. I wish I could tell you that the worst thing about this movie is the lack of a plot line or failure in character development but then I wouldn’t be doing my job.

Five medical students go on a dangerous experiment to gain insight into the mystery of what happens after you die. The unsafe experiment begins when they trigger near-death experiences by stopping their hearts for short periods of time. As their trials become more perilous, each must confront the sins from their past while facing the paranormal consequences of journeying to the other side. However, the sins of the people are not fully explained — which is irritating and makes it incredibly difficult to want to root for any of the characters. The movie opens on Ellen Page’s character driving with a young girl who is presumably her younger sister. Page makes the mistake of checking her phone while driving which ultimately results in her crashing her car into the side of a bridge and flipping into a lake – causing the younger sister to die while Page manages to get out of the sinking vehicle. The movie flashes forward nine years and shines light on Page’s character, who is studying to become a doctor, and her cohort of four other individuals who also lack in the character development department. While the movie started out with a crashing bang (literally — Page’s character flipped her car into a lake) it failed to provide an explanation of the relation between Page’s character and the younger girl and leaves you to assume that they were siblings. It does not shed light on the car crash until right before Page’s character dies.

The overall premise of the movie is that young childhood trauma prompts Page’s character to be interested in the concept of the afterlife. She has one of her coworkers stop her heart and then bring her back to life so she can see if there is indeed an afterlife of some sort. Afterwards, she can magically play the piano and can recall even the most minute details. Because of this she was suddenly excelling in areas that she had not been successful in before, prompting her coworkers to want to do the same. Page had her heart stop for one minute and her coworkers wanted to have theirs stopped for a longer amount of time. In spite of their medical training, it comes as something of a surprise to our “heroes” to learn that temporarily killing themselves might bring about unintended consequences, and all of them begin to experience spooky visions and hallucinations. It takes them an incredibly and unreasonably long time to figure out why this is happening, and the film promptly devolves from a goofy ‘90s throwback into a thoroughly flat movie filled with cheesy jump scares and plenty of angry figures with dark eye makeup glowering in doorways.

In my previous movie reviews, I list what I liked and did not like about a film. Unfortunately, there is not much I can say that I liked about this film. I did like the concept of trying to figure out what happens after a person dies. I guess the thing that I liked most about this movie was when the end credits sequence appeared on the screen. Because there was a lot about this movie that I disliked, I will not go into too much detail about it. I disliked the lack of background information on the characters. If there had been more, such as knowing what their sins that they had to confront were, it would have made it possible to like these characters. Because there wasn’t, to me, it wasn’t even remotely possible to

The movie barely started out strong, and continued to end dull. In other words, the original Flatliners movie should have had a ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ order attached to it to save the director and cast dignity.

KAYoung