Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City Review

Not sure what is more surprising: releasing a horror movie Thanksgiving weekend (instead of the more appropriate October last month) or the movie's quality itself. Dubbed a "reboot" of the film series of six prior entries, it utilizes its visibly low-budget of a reported twenty five million on recreating numerous set pieces from the video game franchise all this is based on, relying on suspense instead of overblown action sequences like the pictures before it. To middling overall results, but hey, I had a blast, and when at the movies, that is all one could ever want.

The plot is a weird hybrid of the first two video games, changing a few moments here and there but maintaining the same basic mythology laid out by its digital forerunners. Did I care that the truck driver, who as fans may remember tips his tanker and explodes, meets his grisly demise by a dog rather than some person at a gas station? Nope, didn't care, diehards beware and be-damned.

Anyway, all the fan-favorites are here, Jill (Hannah John-Kamen), Claire (Kaya Scodelario), Leon (Avan Jogia), Chris (Robbie Amell), among others, new and old, as they battle their way through a zombie outbreak in the soon-to-be ghost town Racoon City. The dual plots, adapting both basic settings of each game, allows for twice the nostalgic bang for your buck; one moment, you see the iconic Spencer Mansion entrance from RE1 and the next you see that slimy Licker scaling the ceiling from RE2. Most major beats are touched upon allowing for a trip down memory lane in just under two hours. Does it have a point? No, especially since you really can just play the games themselves, but writer/director Johannes Roberts clearly loves the games, it shows, and he wants us to watch his playthrough.

But just being faithful doesn't qualify three stars, so what's going on? Why is the rating so high? It's the little things, the parts that showcase that the filmmakers know how to make a film, not just adapt a popular piece of pop culture. It was these neat touches that were fun as a viewer regardless of the material.

The sound design was spot-on, not afraid to be completely silent save for the faint undead screams coming from each end of the theater. Even when a character (or portrayal of a character) I didn't care for was onscreen, there was noticeable tension was I never quite knew what direction the zombie was going to jump out from next. And it's efficient pacing leaves us with seldom a dull moment- even when its just basically somebody shooting at those boring, lumbering zombies, it's often spiced up with gimmicks like a completely black screen, our only illumination being the gunshots of a desperate would-be survivor.

There's another thing that stuck with me as I watched "Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City," and that was the timeliness of the story. Vaccines, outbreaks, lockdowns, corrupt businesses, gun violence- it all felt "real" despite being a movie based on a 90's video game. I doubt that was the intention, but it should have been.

8-Bit Christmas Review

For all the Christmas movies, from made-for-TV "rom-coms" to theatrical releases, there's not telling if it'll become a perennial favorite. HBO Max's original "8-Bit Christmas," which plays like "A Christmas Story" but set in the 80's and trades a BB gun for a Nintendo Entertainment System, has a lot going for it, including some unexpectedly good performances, but occasionally undermines its own homey feel with cheap bodily function (or disfunction) jokes that probably look better in commercials, and can't quite justify the existence of the mild but various political incorrectness. A boy wearing "girls" boots is such a "then" problem that has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with video games.

Now I'll generally laugh at anything as long as somethings funny, but here, it isn't funny. But hey, it was the 80's, a simpler yet probably not any "better" time.

Anyway, the recycled plot... Jake Doyle, played by the plucky Winslow Fegley, wants a Nintendo, badly. Getting one for Christmas means the world to him, and what follows is an hour and a half of him trying and failing to persuade his parents, win one in a wreath-selling contest and trying to buy one during a school trip. Told as a series of flashbacks by adult Jake (Neil Patrick Harris), who's celebrating the season with his own kid who wants her own cellphone, there isn't any substantial parable between his own child wanting and hers except to instigate the whole movie.

But that's OK- the lack of any greater purpose gives the production a small, intimate feeling that I much prefer over last years similarly direct-to-streaming kids movie, the way overstuffed "The Christmas Chronicles 2" on Netflix. 

There is also refreshing absence of an arbitrary villain or any real reason for being outside of the obligatory "meaning of Christmas:" this is a movie about a child who wants a gift on December 25th. That's it. Is it an original? Absolutely not, but like "A Christmas Story" it so brazenly copies, it takes its time, showing the boredom kids experience, the exaggeration that only the youth can imagine and the world-ending realities of obligations like chores. There are many scenes of this, but I wanted even more.

The bulk of the action takes place in the indeterminate "late 80's," where Jake's annoying younger sister Annie (Sophia Reid-Gantzert) is on her own mission to get another dated hot-item, a redhead Cabbage Patch Kid. (With freckles!) They form a loose alliance to help each other get what they want under the tree, but they're still brother and sister and they don't always like each other. Their kidding rivalry is without a doubt the best part of the film, making me nostalgic for my own childhood relationship with my siblings, how you can go from hating each other to being friends. At one point, after he loses all hope of getting his NES, she passes the TV remote to him, as a signal that she understood his silly would-be trauma. I did too.

There are some more curious relics of a less complicated era, like when their parents (June Diane Raphael and Steve Zahn) leave the kids unsupervised in the toy store at the mall towns away. They don't add much to the overall product, but they do aid in cementing the whole "back when I was a kid" feeling. 

I would be remiss not to mention the sudden tonal shift, when the narrative becomes depressing without warning, which is jarring considering the rest of the picture is so aggressively low-stakes. It feels shoehorned into the plot purely to emphasize the spirit of the holidays, as if the producers realized that "8-Bit Christmas" is ultimately a feature-length advertisement of festive commercialization.

Red Notice Review

With a cast including Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot, and Ryan Reynolds, Netflix's would-be blockbuster "Red Notice" has all the grandiose excess of an actual blockbuster, but it lacks the heart, chemistry, and purpose to be anything but a way to spend a lazy afternoon. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but jeez, look at that all-star cast! There is no reason for the flick to be as downright unspectacular as it is, but here we are.

The plot, which is both complicated and basic, has us following FBI agent John Hartley (Johnson) working alongside "the most prolific art thief in the world" Nolan Booth, played by Reynolds (or is he the second most; it doesn't matter) to get to Cleopatra's three eggs ahead of The Bishop (Gadot), the other "most prolific art thief in the world." People get arrested, characters escape, folks are double-crossed, while we deal with outlandish twists involving Nazis (Nazis!) moments of tomb-raiding and heists, all the good stuff, nestled safely within the span of about two hours. But the parts far exceed its sum, as the general template exists as such: exposition happens, action happens, and then its onto the next location. 

And that's fine! James Bond movies do it all the time, but again, look at the cast! And that's only the three billed on the movie poster! Where things crumble on the most simple entertainment level is the spectacle, which is surprisingly perfunctory. This is a very expensive piece of media, yet aside from an opening chase in a Rome art exhibit, the CGI is so obvious that you wonder why The Rock even bothers working out, computers could just digitally add outrageous muscle mass. Bond's best flicks feature some of the most exciting scenes, things that haven't been done before or done with such grace or on such scale or with so much forward momentum. "Red Notice" just sorta has some very famous (and even more expensive) people doing things in front of a camera and greenscreen in a variety of places.

And these should be exotic, exciting places, from Rome to Argentina and others, but it amounts to one of three possible realities: a nice building, a decrepit building, or outside. The international escapades serve as nothing but to change the backdrop to see more of what just happened in last country: pedantic banter between our odd couple of male heroes. Both Reynolds and Johnson can be funny guys, and aside from a few bits involving their "on again, off again" bromance, their quips just sort of come out of their mouths and sit there. Gadot gets even less to work with, as if her contract only allowed her to walk around like a sex object, even during hand-to-hand fisticuffs.

The Egyptian plot device means obligatory shots of desert, which called to mine the goofy exploits in 1999's "The Mummy," which is far better, Booth's and Hartley's daddy issues and the whole Nazi (Nazi!!) involvement riffed on "Indiana Jones," which is far, far better, only it's not smart enough to acknowledge that "The Mummy" copies "Indiana Jones, "which in turn copies James Bond. 

In all honesty, though, perhaps is most reminiscent of 1994's sublime "True Lies" with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis, which also lifted from Ian Fleming's franchise but with the promise of humor, the time's biggest stars, the most breathtaking sequences, and it mostly delivered. "Red Notice" should be returned to sender, repackaged and they can try again.