#29 ELVIS

Starring Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Kelvin Harrison Jr, Xavier Samuel, David tragedy, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Lucy Bracey. Written by Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner. Directed by Baz Luhrmann. Budget $85 million. Running time 160 minutes.

This is the classic Hollywood bio-pic, the rags-to-riches rise of the King of Rock 'n' Roll, the one, the only Elvis (The Pelvis) Presley from dirt-poor Memphis urchin to global megastar dead at the age of 42.

Whether you like this film or not depends on whether you like the man's music or not. If you do, then this greatest hits compilation album of a film will give you all your favourites hits from his entire career and will have you singing along too. Indeed, this is the sort of film that will either re-ignite your love for the man or confirm how much you hate his music. 

I find it's getting harder with modern films to detect any unique directional style from film makers, there's nothing to separate Jurassic Park Domino from Morbius, Unchartered, or Fantastic Beasts, they all just become one massive homogenised visual sludge. Which isn't something you can say about the work of Baz Luhrmann. He may have only made five movies so far in his career, but his visual style is so fantastically unique and dynamic that you know when you're watching one of his movies. This is a beautifully looking, crafted and structured film and Baz stages some stunning reconstructions of Elvis' career, none more so than his triumphant 1968 TV special and his first Las Vegas show.

Austin Butler is a terrific choice for Elvis, although he's perhaps a little skinny but his performance as Elvis is incredible and he almost perfectly captures Elvis's unique brooding sexuality. 

Likewise Tom Hanks excels as Colonel Tom Paker or 'The Admiral' as Elvis calls him, both men seem committed to portraying their characters as convincingly as possible, warts and all.

Elvis's life may have been brief, dying at the age of 42 was a terrible tragedy, but bloody hell did he burn so very, very brightly.  

This is a long film and there are problems with it. The energy wanes at points,  Elvis is presented as being almost too saintly, his demons are hinted at but not explored too greatly, and some aspects of his life, like his movie career, his excesses and his dalliances are all dealt with far too quickly. But those performances, particularly his simply staggering Las Vegas gig, TV special and first gigs are all so fantastically mounted and performed that you're just swept up by it all. Honestly, I'd always thought he'd become a joke by the time of his Las Vegas residency, but when you watch how he worked to develop them and his performances you're left staggered by what a showman he truly was. 

An exhilarating and thoroughly enjoyable movie that just reminds you how pure and astonishing was Elvis Presley in his prime. 

8/10

#28 BLACK PHONE

Starring Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Jeremy Davies, James Ransone and Ethan Hawk. Written by Scott Derrickson and C.Robert Cargill, based on the book 'The Black Phone' by Joe Hill. Directed by Scott Derrickson. Budget $16-18 million , running time 103 minutes.

Set in the 21st Century's version of the 1950s, otherwise known as the 1970s, when everything was so much better, music (disco), movies (Star Wars) and serial killers (John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Dennis Rader etc etc) comes this, a supernatural  serial killer movie, which jumping on the band wagon of Stranger Things and It:Chapter 1, uses teenagers as its protagonists. In Black Phone, a sinisterly masked serial killer dubbed The Grabber (not to be confused with the Graboids from Tremors) is abducting young men from the streets of a Denver suburb and leaving black balloons behind as his calling card, but what happens next...

What happens next is a middling, utterly un-scary horror film, which promises much and delivers very little. It's well crafted, the performances are okay and it's not shit, but that's about it. The trailer promised much, but sadly the main event falls short. Ethan Hawke, who gets star billing is very much absent from proceedings and one is left wondering what exactly it is he brings to the proceedings. As screen killers go his Grabber is genuinely inept, his modus operandi is poorly executed and undefined and it seems all he brings to the proceedings is a series of masks, that scream more an attempt at potential product placement than anything else.  

The supernatural element initially sounds very intriguing but it's all handled in such a pointless way, The Grabber's previous victims all contact the latest victim, Finney (Mason Thames) via a disconnected telephone in the basement of The Grabber's basement and give him advice and tips on how to survive and beat The Grabber. Meanwhile Fin's sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), a foul-mouthed and hilarious 12 year-old with psychic abilities tries to convince the bungling police department she can help. While the deceased victims each provide little life lessons or tips that initially prove to be useless until...

Well, that would be telling. Let's just say, payback's a bitch. 

There's also the introduction of a new character well into the second half of the movie which borders on comedy relief. There's a lot I liked about this film, the lead characters Finny and his sister, Gwen are interesting, as is their school life, they provide the emotional core to the film, but their physically-abusive, alcoholic father (Jeremy Davis) is so violent he ends up being nothing more than a caricature. Likewise the two cops assigned to crack the case are just bumbling Thompson Twin clones, adding to the film's uncomfortable comedy edge. 

You're left wondering why the cops and authorities are so inept, and why they have such difficulty catching the Grabber, particularly when he and his job are at last revealed (along with his black painted and black windowed van that stalks the streets, makes him so obviously the villain) but it appears the cops only go looking for him at night, or in the rain. But that makes sense since they have to be inept for the film's central conceit to work. Likewise you need to ignore the gapping wound like plot holes that intrude on the proceedings and make you go, 'hang on, why doesn't he just do that?'

Whereas this takes pages from the IT and Stranger Things playlist, it obviously learnt no lessons from either and doesn't really know what to do with the intriguing set up and charismatic leads and so pisses it all up basement wall. 

Not a total cluster fuck, just not particularly exciting, scary or intriguing. 

6/10

#27 LIGHTYEAR

Written by Jason exclamation and Angus MacLane, directed by Angus MacLane. Voice actors Chris Evans, Keke Palmer, Peter Sohn, James Brolin, Kaika Waititi, Dal Soules and Uzo Aduba. Budget $200 million. Running time 105 minutes.

In 1995 Andy, the boy from Toy Story, saw a film that was to blown his tiny little mind, and become the single most defining moment of his life. Or so we are told in the caption heralds the start of this 105 minutes cash grab from Disney/Pixar. That film is this one, although its full title in the Toy Story universe is Buzz Lightyear: Space Ranger.

The plot, this bit takes a long time to summarise, feel free to skip the next four paragraphs until...

The plot, which takes two thirds of the running time to actually get going, introduces us to our plucky, lantern jawed hero Buzz, who uses every-single-phrase the Buzz Lightyear of Toy Story used in the opening five minutes of this film, just to let you know this is BUZZ LIGHTYEAR and to reinforce the brand. In this film outing Buzz is awakened from hyper sleep to pilot the Space Ranger starship nicknamed the 'turnip' out of hyper-speed to investigate a new planet that has signs of life.

They land on a planet whose only two lifeforms appear to be insanely aggressive intelligent underground tentacle and a flying armoured bugs. Space Rangers Buzz and his best bud, Hawthorn, and a young rookie set out to investigate the planet. Within seconds of landing the vines attack, some start to drag the HUGE spaceship underground while the others grab the rookie and drag him underground too, and Buzz and Hawthorn race to save both before, you know disaster.

However disaster does strike and the Turnip crashes, leaving it stranded on the planet, thanks to Buzz's attempt to save everybody. It turns out that the crystal that the Turnip needed to achieve hyper-speed was broken in the crash and unless the crew of the Turnip can create a new one they're all stuck on the planet forever. And we're almost ready for the actual story to start.

Buzz is given the mission of test flying a series of spaceships powered by newly grown crystals in an attempt to find one to power the turnip back home. Each time a new crystal is tested it fails and thanks to time dilation costs Buzz 11 years of everyone else's life, which means after four failed missions everyone Buzz knew is now dead of old age. To help him deal with the terrible scenario, a robotic companion cat called Sox is given to him. On the return from one of these test flights, Buzz, now in his far off future finds the planet under siege from a mysterious massive robotic figure called Zurg and his army of flying, stupid robots and joins forces with a rag-bag team of rebel fighters who include the grand-daughter of his old pal Hawthorn and together they set off to fight Zurg. But who is he and what is his connection to Buzz...

...Here!

And that is the plot!

First the good. This looks fantastic, Pixar's ability to create fantastically designed, stunningly  beautiful animated worlds is without peer and this film is no exception. It's a beautifully realised world and the animation is top notch. 

Now the rest. What isn't topnotch, or beautiful is the god-awful generic plot and by-the-numbers script and dialogue. Pixar used to create incredible films that were story lead, in fact they claimed that 'story was king', what a wonderful way to make movies, especially animated one. For 15 years, from 1995 they produced 11 incredible movies, of which 10 were masterpieces and only two, Toy Story 2 and 3 were sequels.

But this is just a very generic, rather dull story with nothing new to say, and it's hard to believe that this film is the film that would define Toy Story's Andy.  

According to Toy Story lore, Andy was 6 years old when he first saw Buzz Lightyear A surprising discovery to be honest, because for me, at the age of six, the film I  saw at the cinema that blew my tiny little mind was The Italian Job (FUN FACT! the first grown up film I ever saw at the cinema, thanks mum!) 

All I can think is that because the animation in this film would have made Andy's world in 1995 seem so low res, badly rendered and crude he was captivated by it and that's what made it so defining, cos it's not the story.

There are cringy character tropes, plot holes, stupid slapstick moments and 'story beats' that do nothing to move the story along, they're just there to add some action. The secondary characters are generic types who aid or derail our plucky hero's journey accordingly, and who obviously go from zeroes to heroes in the end. You'll grown and tut at some of their shenanigans and actions, as they bungle and stumble, for comic relief. There's a running gag with a pen, and I say running cos it's like liquid diarrhea, that will have you groaning out loud when its punchline finally lumbers into view. 

There was one interesting idea in this film, the time dilation concept, but that's quickly forgotten cos this film ain't got time to bleed, it's got a wacky kid's story to tell and you know kids! They want fun things, explosions and lots of wacky silly stuff and a cute character to buy toys of. Everything else can sod off. 

And that bullshit about the first onscreen, same-sex, kiss can sod right off too! Talk about cop out. It's a genuine blink and you'll miss it moment, so brief and toothless is it, that it feels like just one more post-it-note trope the writers could tick off their story beat board. 

So, looks great, but it's popcorn and it won't pull your heartstrings and make you cry like Up, or the Toy Story films, or Wall-e, it won't dazzle you like The Incredibles, and it won't be remembered the next day. It's just there to make money for Disney and sell toys. 

And, there's no way on god's green earth that any six-year old kid is going to have his world rocked by this. He'll forget it the moment he's seen Minions: The Rise of Gru.

6/10

#26: JURASSIC PARK DOMINION

Starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Laura Dern, Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum, DeWanda Wise, Mamoudou Athie, BD Wong, Omar Sy, Campbell Scott. Written by Emily Carmichael and Colin Trevorrow, based on a story by Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow and directed by Colin Trevorrow. Budget $185 million. Running time 146 minutes.

The absolutely best thing in the movie happens before the film even begins, when a dinosaur centric trailer for the new Minions movie is screened. After that, it's downhill all the way.

This is a film with absolutely zero plot or story, which makes this part of the review, the plot synopsis, quite easy to write. The movie sees a bunch of characters run around a lot, and do stuff while dinosaurs menace them but only kill characters we've never seen before, before a showdown in a deserted hi-tech base. Avoiding the need for a proper story, don't believe the hype that the credits would have you believe that somehow this film took four people to write. From the look of things all they did was to sit in a room and using crayons and the back of used envelopes make a list of their favourite bits from the past five films and then tried to piece them together in some sort of order. 

Actually this film starts off quite promisingly, well the first 10 to 15 minutes anyway, with a quick view of what the world looks like with dinosaurs living among us, a dinosaur wrangling chase, followed by a character from the last film, who was a clone, recreating a scene from the from every film where everyone looks up in awe as big dinosaurs stroll past. Then there's a bit with Blue, the intelligent Raptor from the last two films in the forest, before you're confronted by something genuinely chilling, a swarm of dinosaur locus! And you find yourself thinking, 'hey, this might be good!' 

Trust me it isn't.

Because after that this is downhill all the way, and it's not downhill in a sort of slow acceleration until terminal velocity is achieved! NO SIRRE! It's a rocket propelled sledge mounted at the top of Mount Everest and pointed down!

Three separate story threads slightly diverge before coming back together in a showdown so corny, cliched and signposted that not only will you groan out loud, you'll shout abuse at the screen. I know I did.

This film does away with dialogue or plot in favour of coincidence and 'phew, that was lucky', moments. Characters suddenly find themselves exactly where they need to be to move on to the next plot point, at one point in this 'film' two of our heroes, there are eight in total, are told how to find the exact place they're looking for and how much time they'll have to do the heroic thing they need to do.

Look, I could happily waste 10,000 words listing how lazy, bland, and staggering stupid this film is, but what's the point?

Truth be told, I haven't enjoyed the Jurassic Park movies, sure the first one was good, but that's because it's the first and has a genius making it, but this one is just a two-tonne, cash dinosaur. Young kids, will probably love it, cos you know, dinosaurs. The rest of us will just sit there and wonder if you remembered to turn the gas off when you left the house.

My son, wisely refused to come with the rest of us to see this and by doing so missed out on the best part of the evening – sitting in bar afterwards laughing at it and slagging off just how shit this shit-filled, shitty shitfest is. 

Hooray! Another crappy franchise is dead! Long live the next crappy franchise!

3/10