A Merry Little Ex-Mas Review

Netflix's "A Merry Little Ex-Mas" has a Hollywood cast (including Alicia Silverstone) and director (veteran Steve Carr), but the heart of a disposable Hallmark Christmas rom-com. Its script by Holly Hester, who's credits include writing two other similar pictures, is unable to comfortably balance honest sentimentality with genre obviousness, leaves you shouting at the screen "just kiss already" as it strings you along with scene after scene of awkward nothingness before reaching its conventional conclusion.

Silverstone stars as Kate, the local handyperson in the idyllic little town of, get this, Winterlight, who gave up her career ambitions as in green architecture or, something, once she met Everett (Oliver Hudson), a doctor. She followed him to this totally-believably named town and began a family. But as the movie starts, they two are in the middle of getting a divorce. Or as the film calls "conscious uncoupling," har he har har. The two, however, are remarkably amicable to one another, even planning to celebrate the Christmas traditions they practiced when together. What could possibly go wrong?

See, Everett has a girlfriend Kate doesn't know about (the younger Tess, played by Jameela Jamil), but Kate has her own secret: she's going to sell the house, move out and return to work. Seriously, she got her old job back- in this economy?

But while she somehow keeps this secret for much of the runtime, Everett's little secret slips out once she meets her daughter Sienna's (Emily Hall) new boyfriend Nigel. He's annoying played by Timothy Innes, the character obsessed with Harry Potter only because I think because the movie thinks they look alike.

Anyway, Kate is surprised and hurt by the revelation, but instead of dealing with her feelings like a responsible adult, she strings alone Chet, played with all the brains of a chestnut roasting by an open fire by Pierson Fodé. They meet at a tree farm (like, five days before Christmas), but since he's "Chet, a man of many hats," he's also a nanny, snowplow driver and male exotic dancer. He's not exactly funny, but what he'll say or do next was the only unexpected thing about the whole production.

Melissa Joan Hart is here too, playing Kate's friend and godmother to her two kids, but she's given nothing to do except a producers credit and to gawk at Chet's arm muscles.

To the film's credit, Silverstone and Hudson do have chemistry; so does Silverstone and Fodé. As does Hart and Fodé. Really the casting is spot on and they all do seem to be having genuine fun, and in its own strange way, is kinda nice to see it all unfold. Except for Nigel, what even is that character?

"A Merry Little Ex-Mas" isn't the worst holiday movie I've ever seen, that would probably be last year's large lump of coal "Dear Santa," but considering the relative talent involved, it is a frustratingly lazy one.

Oh, and I should mention the sexy gingerbread house making, which is a sentence as uncomfortable to type as it was to watch.

A House of Dynamite Review

Director Kathryn Bigelow gathered quite the impressive cast for her latest film, the Netflix original "A House of Dynamite;" everyone from Idris Elba to Rebecca Ferguson to Anthony Ramos is here, a tale of what happens inside the United States government when a nuclear strike is made on US soil. We don't see the reason for the attack, the explosion or the fallout, just the immediate events to personnel leading up to the discovery, attempted de-escalation and reality of a potentially nuclear war.

Strangely structured into a handful of chapters, we first meet Olivia Walker (Ferguson) as she goes through security and sits down at her desk, ready for another day as senior officer in the US Situation Room. Thousands of miles away sits Dan Gonzalez (Ramos), commander of the military base that quickly spots what everyone thinks is another routine test from another country. Yeah sure, like we'd have a whole movie if it was just that. 

Back in DC, director (Jason Clarke) tells Olivia that he's got some reports to fill out and to only get him if the world falls apart. Those reports are definitely not getting filled out today. Of course a video conference is called, with as the Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris), the Deputy National Security Advisor (Gabriel Basso), the Combatant Commander (Tracy Letts), among others, to prep a briefing for the president (Idris Elba, possibly the only celebrity I'd vote for). But it's quickly determined that this is no missile test, but instead an actual nuclear invasion, country of origin and reasoning still unknown. It's predicted to hit Chicago in approximately sixteen minutes and cost something like ten million lives.

As the ensemble cast scrambles to try and place the "who and why" behind the strike, "A House of Dynamite" name-drops a laundry list of ye olde cliches, chiefly North Korea, China, Iran and Russia, and legitimate or not, it's hard to muster any level of cinematic attachment when the potential villains sound like a decade old Tom Clancy novel, but I digress.

Gonzalez leads a team to intercept the missile, knocking it out of commission before it makes landfall, but with a sixty one percent chance of success, it's like, ahem, hitting a bullet with a bullet, or so the script says. With odds like that, reality sets in, but they don't panic as they would in a lesser movie: sure, Olivia tries frantically to reach her ill son and husband, telling him to get in the car and just drive, before hanging up the phone, but we're fortunately saved the hackneyed sights of nameless groups of people screaming frantically as they make a coordinated route to the exit signs. The minutes of impact keep ticking down until the interpose fails, and its up to the POTUS to make the call on retaliation.

We then time travels back to the same approximate start time and plays out more-or-less the same events, but from the perspective of the Secretary of Defense and his immediate coworkers and then of the president and his meticulously planned activities; it's a bold move that works because of the different personal stakes every group has, elevated by game players who know the power of a pause mid-sentence.

My favorite is Tracy Letts, who handles himself like that one cool teacher everyone had in school, more focused on his coffee and "the game last night" until he needs to actually take things seriously. I suppose it makes up for his character not exactly having much of a backstory.

"A House of Dynamite" doesn't offer an easy answer because there isn't one, but the audience will no doubt feel cheated at its abrupt and anti-climatic climax. And yes, in a way this is just two hours of people sitting, walking and running, looking worried on the phone, but the narrative thread weaving between secretaries, radar stations, the Situation Room and the president himself keeps you thinking. Imagine, a film that asks something of you, instead of just bombarding you with pretty, computer-generated spectacle. This is an unusual thriller in that all the action is hypothetical, and exhausting and stressful in a way your commercial, big-budget blockbuster could never be.

Vicious Review

While Renny Harlin is out bastardizing "The Strangers" franchise by remaking a sub-90 minute long film into a trilogy, its creator, Bryan Bertino, is out writing and directing other things. Unfortunately, his efforts resulted in Paramount+'s "Vicious."

Starring Dakota Fanning, who chainsmokes between screaming and crying, as Polly, a cronic underachiever on a snowy night, living in a house she rents from her far more successful sister Lainie (Rachel Blanchard), when she gets a knock on the door. She opens it to find a decrepit old woman, played by Kathryn Hunter, who says she thought she knew someone who used to live here. Polly lets her in, offering to call her a cab, when the lady pulls out a box and places it on the coffee table, gifting it to her. Polly is a bit perplexed, but that confusion soon turns to fright when the old lady starts saying "you're going to die tonight." Let this be a lesson to you kids to never talk to strangers.

Polly kicks out the old woman and the box, who proceeds to try and figure out what to wear the next day. It's "a big day" we're told, Polly apparently hoping to go back to school (I think, the film never bothers to fuss over small details like character development). But as she sits on her bed, we see a blurry figure shifting behind her. She yells "Polly," who shrieks only to turn around to an empty room. She calls her mom (Mary McCormack) in a panic, who seems to downplay the oddness of her daughter's evening in favor of chastising her cigarette habit. "You said you'd quit," she tells Polly over the phone. My mom would probably be more upset at all the expletives she says, but I digress. 

Now back in the living room but still on the phone, Polly is stunned to see the box is now on her coffee table, inside an hourglass not yet ticking down. But then plot happens, and it turns out her mom is not actually her mom but someone behind this whole thing with the old lady and the box. She says she'll die tonight unless she puts inside something she hates, something she needs and something she loves. Sounds simple enough (I'd wager the smokes would count for all three).

What follows is a confusing mess of scenes that don't really make any sense, from mirror-people, calls from dead people, neighbors who kill themselves and doors that won't open, among many others. But what can and can't happen is never explained, nor the reason why, and it is this lack of logic that isolates any of the action onscreen from resonating with us. 

Without any real purpose, "Vicious" fails as a horror movie, settling on cheap would-be jump scares, loud "bangs" and visions of things that aren't really happening; it's like a ghost movie without the ghost. Oh, and the ending, which I won't spoil, is so lame and so decidedly unscary that it's hard to imagine it coming from the same guy who crafted the depressing and distressing climax of 2008's "The Strangers." 

The film doesn't know what it's trying to say, what its own rules are or the point of any of this, settling instead on an appealing lead, Tristan Nyby's good cinematography, moody lighting and a bunch of cliches.

The Strangers – Chapter 2 Review

"The Strangers - Chapter 2" was filmed alongside last year's "Chapter 1," with "Chapter 3" still unreleased. The interwebs tells me all three were to be released in 2024, so I don't know what happened there. I have no idea what happened behind the scene, and to not commit a critic-sin, I can't say what happens onscreen. What I can say is that this sequel is bad. Awful. Dreadful. Boring. Dumb. Bloated. And perhaps most damning, completely unscary. I sat in a mostly empty theater stone-faced, unflinching to any of the myriad of alleged jump-scares, growing increasingly annoyed at just how monotonous the whole production ended up being. It's not merely just bad, but artistically inert, unable to even become so-bad-it's-good. 

This is the worst kind of film, so passionateless and mechanical, showcasing just what a hack director Renny Harlin, once a decently respected director, has become. This is the man who made what is probably Hollywood's second best shark movie for crying out loud!

A part of me would love to hate this film, but it is so ruthlessly hollow an experience that I just couldn't muster up any emotions. Like a VHS without any film, this is an empty husk where a movie should be.

The plot, sure, we can get that out of the way. The sole survivor of the first chapter, Maya (Madelaine Petsch) is recovering in a nearby hospital. She wakes to learn her fiance Ryan (Froy Gutierrez), who was also attacked, was not so lucky. This should be a touching moment, but at least he doesn't have to suffer through this dreck.

Maya would likely have lived a normal life then, but then the local sheriff and Deputy (Richard Brake and Pedro Leandro, respectively), have to go and yap about the girl who lived in the local diner. (A place so busy you'd swear it's the town's only restaurant.) Does that mean the three killers also frequent the eatery? Bold of you to assume such basic questions would be answered. 

Because the police don't bother having a guard to protect a woman who barely survived a deadly home invasion, that very night, the masked killers swarm the hospital, which is multiple stories large yet we only ever see, like, four people working there. She's awake because of a nightmare, then her phone rings, an unknown number. She answers it, only to hear one of the masked assailants on the other end. Then she hears a voice outside her room, a man who sounds to be being killed. What's a negative one-dimensional horror movie heroine to do? Call the cops? Pull the fire alarm? No silly, she tries to escape. Of course moments later, only after the power is cut does she try and call. Naturally, there's no cell reception then. Frustrated? Just wait til it happens again!

Anyway, Maya desperately tries to hide somewhere in the hospital, eventually slipping into the morgue. She squeezes next to a dead body in one of those freezer things just before the masked man with the ax walks in. He knows she's somewhere and begins checking each of the cold corpse coolers when he stops, staring directly at the one she's in. He pauses only because the filmmakers mistook idiocy for tension, but then a hapless nurse walks in, who's quickly chopped down. She leaves once the man in the burlap sack goes to hide the body, but I kept thinking to myself, what a great hiding place! She gets to lie down, it's not too hot PLUS she gets a little vent to peak out of, so she can scope the room for when the cops or whoever come by. That, and the killers would no doubt not check a room they already cleared, especially with those tempting woods right next door just begging horror movie characters to run around in.

Maya (of course) leaves and escapes outside into the rainy night, no doubt seduced by the idea of being in a wet hospital gown in the dark. Some plot happens and she flags down nurse Danica (Brooke Johnson) and her friend, who say she's safe now and that she can stay with them. Never did it occur to her to try and figure out how one of her patients escaped, but there I go again with my logic. Maya has a panic attack once they pick up two men, thinking these four are the killers. (Nevermind the fact that there are only three murderers but whatever.)

So like anyone with stitches would do, she steals a knife, boots and some medical supplies and lunges out of a moving vehicle. The foursome pull over and try to find her, but she's just hidden herself far too well behind a dying log to be spotted. Hide-and-seekers just hate to see her coming.

More plot happens and then, and I'm not making this up, the masked ax man lets out a wild boar, who quicky finds and attacks her. Why he didn't follow the animal is never explained. (I'm holding out that they'll answer this mystery in part 3.)

Then after some more plot, and Maya awakes in the care of Danica from before, her wounds cleaned and stitched, but what's this? Why, she's in her panties, so cue scenes of her hardly clothed buttocks, just for fun. In a peverse way, it's the best part of the movie. A sad, depressingly lifeless movie that is so relentlessly unexciting that it could inspire someone who has never read anything in their life to pick up a book and go to town.

One time had to get my license from the DMV, where I waited outside in the chilly November weather: it was more exciting than this. It doesn't help that the ending, what should be the "big reveal," is so poorly handled that you have no idea the "who's" and "why's." With its hour and a half or so runtime feels like three, "The Strangers - Chapter 2" is a cinematic dead-zone.

The Conjuring: Last Rites Review

"The Conjuring" films have their work cut out for them, considering a quick internet search shows, somehow, about half the population believes in the paranormal. I am firmly not in that camp, so smart people like me have to sit and watch make-believe in hopes of entertainment. And this fourth entry, subtitled "Last Rites," is as goofy as they come.

The film opens with Ed and Lorraine Warren, two real-life paranormal investigators and likely con-artists, in an antique shop of sorts, after the owner is found dead by hanging. A pregnant Lorraine decides to investigate, hearing the voices that allegedly drove the old man to his suicide, stumbles upon a mirror, one with three faces carved into the wood at the top. She touches it, lots of loud noises are produced and she's induced. Now at the local hospital, doctors believe she has a miscarriage, but thanks to the power of prayer, their little baby girl takes her first breath. It's all very sweet until you realize this is a horror movie, and babies don't have the best track record in this territory. 

Stars Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson (who's facial hair is not quite ready to commit to actual mutton chops) reprise their roles as the paranormal pairing, now since retired from a life of ghostbusting. And when their now-grown daughter Judy (Mia Tomlinson) returns home from, I dunno college I suppose, new boyfriend in tow named Tony (Ben Hardy), it all becomes very sitcom. Aside from the fact that the family keeps a room locked away in their house littered with purportedly haunted items, of course.

Simultaneously, we follow the Smurl family, a poor and of course religious family of eight living in Pennsylvania. Their daughter Heather (Kíla Lord Cassidy) is seen having her confirmation ceremony, which I'm assuming is something god-fearing people do to try and get on the invisible man's good-side, then thusly gifted the aforementioned mirror, and, I dunno, that ends up inviting demons in. Or ghosts. Or spirits. Or something, I paid attention, I truly did I swear.

The teenager suspects something bad about the mirror, bringing it to the trash one night with the help of her sassy sister Dawn (Beau Gadsdon). The garbage men pick it up and their big truck smashes it, and then the demon fun begins. People float above their beds, a freaky old woman holds toys and phone cords are yanked. (Oh did I forget to mention this takes place during the eighties?) You'd think this is when the Warren's would be called in, but then the runtime wouldn't be able to exceed two hours, so here we are.

But their cries to the local news do attract the attention of Father Gordon (Steve Coulter), a good friend of Ed and Lorraine, or so this fourth movie in a franchise says. (You would think child services would also hear about kids being in constant danger, but I digress.) Their house remains haunted for months, and since they're destitute, are unable to move out. I imagine they're not all that well-liked since they never try to stay with friends or family. Gordon almost immediately detects somethings wrong, but due to plot he ends up killing himself. And for some reason, Judy takes it upon herself to travel to PA and try and help figure out what happens to Gordon. You know, what the police should be doing, but cops just keep back crowds back in movies like this.

So her parents and boyfriend-turned-fiance travel to the Smurl residence, and up until then, I hadn't actively disliked the flick all that much. But then characters lurk about alone in the dark when they shouldn't, which would be impossible considering the tiny house homes eight people! And it happens constantly, so often in fact that I had to keep my intense urge to scream at the screen contained. You would think they'd wait until its light out, grab a buddy and then enter a room where a mysterious voice echoes.

Lorraine just lumbers around looking concerned, and Ed and his sideburns speak in doomy monologues; it's all so self-indulgent. And unfortunately, not all that scary. The same problem that plagued entry number three, that one quickly notices the pattern: someone goes somewhere they shouldn't, the music gets all tense then stops until a monster jumps out. When the film finds an interesting location for all this, sure, it can be fun. A scene in a dressing room is interesting and well done, but come on, another haunted house?

But yes, in the end the plot revolves around a haunted mirror, which in itself isn't all that silly, but what is is when the furniture physically moves and attacks; it is so unbelievably stupid to see veteran actors like Wilson and Farmiga have to combat a hunk of wood. A satire maybe could have made it work, or some broad comedy even, but the filmmakers instead settled on the funless and pretentious.

The Thursday Murder Club Review

There's little in the way of actual comedy in "The Thursday Murder Club," debuting on Netflix just a few days ago, which is curious as it considers itself one. It's more of a lightweight dramatic detective film, if that is such a genre, with a ludicrous plot that I suppose counts as a comedy.

We're introduced to Joyce (Celia Imrie), a newly retired nurse now living at Cooper's Chase, the most unbelievably swanky retirement village you'll ever see. She stumbles into what she thinks it's the puzzle room, only to witness vintage crime scene photos strung up surrounded by fellow retirees: Elizabeth (Helen Mirren), Ron (Pierce Brosnan) and Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley). They belong to the titular "Thursday Murder Club," working through old cold-case files every Thursday I think. The film isn't terribly clear if they do this just once a week, especially since they work night and day once the co-owner of the place Tony Curran (Geoff Bell) turns up dead early on in the runtime.

He's found bludgeoned in his house not long after a disagreement with business partner Ian Ventham (David Tennant), who wants to demolish the place and put in condos or something. Ian is immediately named suspect number one, but that's less to do with effective detective work by local DCI Chris Hudson, played with a sweet tooth by Daniel Mays and much (much, much, much...) more by the amateur gang of aging sleuths.

Their liaison is a plucky rookie cop named Donna (Naomi Ackie), who visited the home earlier on the day of the (first) murder to discuss the importance of locking your doors and windows. Fortunately, that is one of just a handful of geriatric jokes, the rest being few and far between. There's actually far more would-be tender moments about aging, ranging from dementia to hospice care, and these scenes I presume come with the territory, but the script by Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcote have no interest in dealing with the true horrors of getting older. Of course, all this could be a result of the book of the same name by Richard Osman, but as I have never read it, your guess is as good as mine.

There's more of course, more characters, plot points and developments, but it's a mystery so I need to do my critical duty and keep some things close to my chest. The big reveal, however, is laborious and ridiculous, dependent on way too many coincidences, hunches and lucky guesses to be satisfying or even logical.

Fortunately, the excellent cast is fantastic and totally game for this material, striking exactly the right tone between serious thriller and goofy parody, and it's fun as the audience to see such famous actors and actresses having what clearly is a good time.

The crisp direction from Chris Columbus keeps the plot moving along at a steady clip, letting the Cooper's Chase become a character of its own; it's grandiose halls, fields and architecture seemingly stretching on for miles. I mean, it's all completely preposterous that it'd be so posh, but hey, it's a movie where Helen Mirren infiltrates the United Kingdom police department and quite literally solves multiple crimes in the span of a week.

If the whole affair plays like an extended episode of Murder, She Wrote, then so be it; it's to film's benefit that I quite like that show 

Nobody 2 Review

2021's "Nobody" was a bit of fresh air in the oftentimes stale action thriller genre, taking the niche carved out by the "John Wick" franchise and narrowing its world-building while adding a slight satirical edge. Most films cut from the cloth of Mr. Reeves' franchise take themselves way too seriously, so this lighter helped it stand out.

But uh-oh, with success comes the inevitable sequel, but "Nobody 2" ends up just recycling everything that happened in the first picture and tries pushing it to the next level. But instead of raising the stakes, it makes things feel bloated and self-righteous, the gimmick of a non-action star (Bob Odenkirk) staring in an action movie no longer enough. Add to that a tired script and a vacation artifice and you have a wasted opportunity at the movies.

One interesting thing during my showing was that, near the end of the runtime, I heard a baby cry; I look back and wouldn't you know it, some family brought a literal baby to a rated R film. To the people who did that, you are bad parents.

Bob returns as Hutch, who is now working for The Barber (Colin Salmon), a mysterious man who runs a mysterious business procuring mysterious things, trying to pay off his debts after the events of the first film. He's told he should be "done by spring," or something like that, but if the original was about a man trying to escape his past, this one is all about how that's impossible. Some character development...

Hutch's wife Becca (Connie Nielsen) is frustrated with how little he's around, out working by the time she wakes up and still out come dinner time. And Hutch, well, he's aware that he's not really "present" to his kids when his son Brady (Gage Munroe) has a black eye from an altercation at school. He tells The Barber he needs a break, a vacation if you will, so he takes his nuclear family to Plummerville, a scrubby amusement park/tourist trap that his dad (Christopher Lloyd) took him to when he was young. Cue "Holiday Road-" wait, that only plays during the trailers? Come on!

Problems arise almost immediately when Hutch rubs the local sheriff Abel (Colin Hanks) the wrong way at a hot dog place, but things really heat up when Brady punches another teenager at an arcade. Why? Because he took his sister Sammy's (Paisley Cadorath) stuffed animal and ripped it in half. The family is kicked out of the building, and just as they're leaving, an employee hits Sammy in the back of the head- well, more of a flick, but you get the idea. And, because this is a movie about an assassin on sabbatical, instead of talking to the manager, the police or, you know, just getting the hell out of town, he beats up a bunch of goons inside. Until the cops show up, and we find out that Abel might be the sheriff, but that the town is really run by Wyatt (John Ortiz), owner of the theme park. And that the kid who Brady hit was his son. What a twist, I know.

This is where I thought to myself "OK, the story's established, let's get the plot out of the way," but then the film's like "wait, there's more!" Wyatt might "run" the town, but Abel feels he really should (I don't think either cops or business men should, but I digress). And fine sure, a bit of tension between the two villains is fine I guess, let's move on. But Derek Kolstad and Aaron Rabin's pompous script's like "no no wait, you'll love this too;" Plummerville is actually a bootleggers town, and working its way though right at this moment is a shipment of MacGuffins for Ledina (Sharon Stone), a ruthless supervillain of sorts who Wyatt owes his own debt to. It is all very complicated, very silly and very unexciting.

Due to plot Wyatt and Hutch team up and booby-trap the amusement park, much like the office in the first movie, but aside from a few neat touches like having a ride fall onto nameless thugs, there isn't really all that done with the environment; most baddies are dispatched by gunshots or explosions, leaving this location as just window dressing for the very same, very old thing.

The casting of Sharon Stone is inspired, and Odenkirk imbues the right amount of weariness into his reprised role, but the magic is gone with round two; the filmmakers try to recapture lightning in a bottle with an opened soda can.