Last OK Movie You Saw

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The Map of Tiny Perfect Things

What if Palm Springs starred a couple of teenagers?? The answer is this movie with its stupid title. It was pretty ok though even if I hate the youths.

[Mister Jack]

Mortal Kombat

 

Finally got around to watching this on HBO Max and it's 100% a fanservice movie. If you're not already familiar with MK lore then this movie is not interested in filling you in on anything more than the basics, but if you are a fan of the franchise then they really went out of their way to give you what you would want to see in a Mortal Kombat movie. The signature moves are there, the fatalities are there, even the iconic announcer lines make their way in. Most importantly, the blood and gore is present in copious amounts. It is complete pandering but it's the kind of pandering I can't help but get into. The fight choreography is also quite good.

 

However, I do have issues. I can forgive the plot being just a thinly veiled excuse to have a bunch of fight scenes, but even then it still does a few things where I was not a fan. The main character is an OC Donut Steel who was made up for the movie, which I'm not against on principle but he's just not very interesting and his powers are stupid. I have nothing against the actor who played him, I'm sure he did the best he could with the material he was given, but that material wasn't good. It just made me wish they'd used Johnny Cage instead, who isn't even in this movie at all. Some of the exposition scenes also get dull, but Kano steals the show whenever he's in the scene. He honestly salvages the talky portions of the film. 

 

I don't see myself watching this one over and over but I bet I'll be looking up the fight scenes on Youtube every now and then. I wouldn't mind seeing a sequel.

Edited May 14, 2021 by Mister Jack

[Mister Jack]

Raya: The Last Airbender

 

Sorry, I mean Raya and the Last Dragon. Yeah, it's pretty much impossible to watch this without drawing comparisons because they're very very similar in a lot of ways. Obviously Avatar is the superior story, but let's put that aside and pretend this movie exists in a vacuum for a bit. How does it shape up then? Well, it's still just kind of okay. Honestly, a globetrotting adventure story in a fantasy land like this one works better as a tv show than as a two hour movie. Hell, it's not even really two hours. It's more like 90 minutes with an extremely long credits sequence at the end. That's just not enough time to build this up properly. Aside from the Fang and Heart nations (they're all named after dragon parts) every other part of the world just feels rushed. If this were a tv show they could have been properly explored.

 

If you're willing to accept some uneven pacing, the movie is mostly fine. The animation is obviously gorgeous, I like the dragon a lot, there are some decent action scenes, and while the jokes didn't really make me laugh they didn't make me groan either. I would have considered a lower-tier entry for the good movie thread if not for one thing: the moral of this movie is completely broken.

 

What do I mean by that? Well the message of this story is that people need to be able to trust each other and Raya is framed as being in the wrong for being suspicious of everyone she meets. If you ask me that's a debatable moral to begin with but I would have accepted it if the writing supported that argument. But it doesn't. Time and time again Raya or Sisu or someone else just keep getting stabbed in the back. This fantasy world is full of terrible, selfish people and Raya is absolutely right not to trust them but somehow we're supposed to want her to put her faith in people who keep screwing her over? Really? Also I really hate the Princess Namaari character. She's basically the Zuko of this film and I don't even consider it a spoiler to say that she gets redeemed eventually because of course she does. Did you really expect any different? The problem with that is that this is a 90 minute movie so unlike Zuko, who has to earn his redemption over the course of an entire season, Namaari gets forgiven almost instantly despite committing crimes for which she honestly deserves to be put to death. It's frustrating to watch and just made me resent her.

 

So yeah, that inconsistent tone is why this is in the OK movies thread instead of the good movies thread. It's alright if you already have Disney+ since they're no longer asking for 30 freaking dollars for the privilege of watcing it.

[TheMightyEthan]

Hmm, I saw that was free on Disney+ now and was thinking about watching it this weekend. Is it worth the time?

[Mister Jack]

Yeah sure, if you got nothing else going on this weekend then why not. I didn't hate it and it had a few good things going for it. There are very few Disney animated films that I find obnoxiously bad and this wasn't one of them. 

[CorgiShinobi]

I saw Raya this past weekend. The wife and I saw the Last Airbender similarities right away. Like, you can easily find them with little effort.

 

It's still a fun watch, but yeah the message to me was "be willing to trust others." It sorta works, but for the most part people are untrustworthy in this film because they've been hurt. A series of mistrust only spreads more.

 

Another film not worth the $30 and would probably be a good film to have if you have children and that's it. Like, it's beautiful for sure, but that's its best attribute.

[Mister Jack]

What film IS worth 30 dollars, really? Assuming you're not paying for a big family to watch in which case it probably seems more reasonable.

[Thursday Next]

It's going to take a big film to make me stump up the £20 to watch it on Disney+ premiere thingy rather than just wait for it to go on standard "But I already paid you DIsney+". But I think it is definitely worth it for families. The cost of taking yourself, partner and two kids to the cinema to watch the latest Marvel film would dwarf $30, plus you'll miss half of it because you are taking kids to the loo, or otherwise being distracted by parenting your children, or being distracted by other people not parenting their kids. 

[Mister Jack]

Terrifier 2

 

This wasn't on my radar but I read reports that this low-budget slasher was so gory that it was literally making people vomit and faint in their theater seats and one person even needed to go to the hospital. I, being a horror lover, took that as a personal challenge and watched this with a friend. Final verdict? We were laughing. This movie isn't scary, at least not to us, but we still had a good time with it because of how LUDICROUSLY over the top it is. Art the Clown doesn't just slice people up. He kills in the most cartoonishly dickish ways imaginable and it's so excessively sadistic that it was hilarious to us.

 

Spoiler

For example, there's a scene where he kills a girl by slicing open her eyeball, then using scissors to cut off her scalp and expose her brain, then breaking her arm off of her body, then ripping her other arm in half lengthwise with his bare hands.

 

AND THEN!

 

Just when you think it's over, he comes back and starts pouring bleach and rubbing salt into her open wounds before ripping off half her face. My friend and I both started cracking up when he ran into the room holding the bleach and salt containers. It's just way too much to take seriously.

 

Mind you, I'm not calling people wimps for passing out. This movie is definitely an 11 on the gore scale so it's totally understandable that the squeamish can't handle it, but we're very desensitized to this stuff. How is it outside the gore? Well, better than I expected, honestly. Not great, and it's about 20 minutes too long, but it has some pretty high highs. While the story doesn't really explain anything and just serves as a vehicle to move Art from one nonsensical killing to the next, the main heroine was actually pretty compelling. Lauren LaVera delivered a fantastic performance and her character was one I found myself caring about to my surprise. I honestly hope this movie is the beginning of big things for her because she has real talent. I don't really think this is one I'll be coming back to over and over, but it was a real hoot of an evening. Watch it with a buddy, provided you both have strong stomachs. The movie cost only 250,000 to make but I'm convinced at least 200k of that went into buying fake blood and guts.

Edited October 29, 2022 by Mister Jack

[toxicitizen]

1 hour ago, Mister Jack said:

Art the Clown doesn't just slice people up. He kills in the most cartoonishly dickish ways imaginable and it's so excessively sadistic that it was hilarious to us.

 

I've been hearing the same buzz and it got me curious. I haven't watched it yet but I have seen a short clip that I'm pretty sure is the exact same thing you describe in your spoiler tag, and yeah I had the same reaction. It's definitely gory as hell but it's so over the top that it becomes comical. My expectations for the movie changed completely after that lol.

[Mister Jack]

Renfield

 

Nicolas Cage is Dracula. That should be all you need right there but this was fairly enjoyable outside of that. The premise is that Dracula was never killed because his loyal servant Renfield came to his rescue at the last moment and the two of them have been on the move for nearly a century since then, but over time Renfield starts realizing he is in an abusive relationship (not romantic) with Dracula and wants to escape from it. The codependency theme of the movie is extremely on the nose and not subtle at all, but it still made for some good scenes between Renfield and Dracula. There's also a side plot about an organized crime ring that Renfield runs afoul of when he brings some of their members back to Dracula for him to feed on. Renfield gains temporary vampire powers whenever he eats a bug—a reference to the novel—and there are some gory fight scenes where heads, limbs, and guts go flying whenever Renfield gets his hands on a bad guy. The CGI blood isn't convincing, but there are some pretty fun and creative kills in here anyway. Dracula, despite being played by Nicolas Cage, isn't as hammy as I expected him to be. Oh sure, there's definitely ham, it's Nicolas Cage, but Dracula is portrayed as a disturbingly realistic domestic abuser and psychopath who uses some really monstrous methods to keep Renfield under his control without even getting into the vampire powers, although he definitely uses those to horrific effect as well. Ultimately, this is a fairly low budget film and there are some pacing issues here and there, but I'd recommend watching it at least once because there's probably going to be something in here you like.

[TheMightyEthan]

I heard on a podcast that this Dracula manages to simultaneously be Transylvanian, British, and Nicholas Cage. Can you you confirm?

[Mister Jack]

I could agree with that assessment.

[Mister Jack]

Ant Man and The Wasp: Quantumania

 

Yeah, it's pretty average. This is basically "Green Screen: The Movie" and I'm never a big fan of that. I found Ant Man's teenage daughter really annoying, MODOK is treated as a joke and his effects look awful, I didn't really care about the side characters in the quantum realm, and the first half of the movie can get kind of boring when they keep hyping up the villain without actually showing him. However, Kang is the movie's saving grace. What you get here is basically a preview of his threat level in the next Avengers movie and yeah, I can believe this guy is going to be a huge problem. Is it worth seeing for that? Ehh, maybe when it comes to Disney+. Or you could just look up his scenes on Youtube later. I don't really think you need to go to a theater for this one. While I did like Kang as a villain, I just came off of Guardians vol. 3 and I still liked High Evolutionary more as an antagonist.