博客存档 - CINEMABRIEFING.COM

'Sonic the Hedgehog 3' briefing

12/20/2024

3 (out of 4)

PUSH THE BUTTON

I’ve purposely neglected to throw in my two cents about Sonic with each passing movie — the first was basically the last theatrical release to take the money and run right before the pandemic hit hard in 2020, and the second was one of the surest early signs that we’d come full circle around COVID in spring of 2022. Needless to say I consider myself a movie guy, not some video game NERD, and thus the new wave of more legitimate adaptations (finally not so frequently derided and ridiculed) has taken some time to reconcile with.

In general Mortal Kombat has either some of the worst lines of the 90s or you’ve only seen the 2021 version, with a sequel due next year. I for one have never experienced the Resident Evil franchise but would probably enjoy it if I did — elsewhere I remember watching Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li because I heard just how laughably bad it was, and it didn’t disappoint (the 90s original can't be too far off). Silent Hill has only been followed by the likes of Five Nights at Freddy’s, Lord knows when horror gaming will be tapped for mucho moolah. But like, Gran Turismo? Need for Speed? Angry Birds and Assassin’s Creed? What could these amount to? Fuck I did review that Lara Croft reboot, 2018's Tomb Raider, what a forgettable flick. Back in the day I enjoyed Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for what it was. Alas, as far as the most watched game adaptations, I skipped Warcraft, Uncharted and didn’t even know Rampage was one. I can say Detective Pikachu is the poorest excuse for a major live action Pokemon movie, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie was as good as it needed to be for its massive global audience. So you see, I barely know what I’m talking about.

ANYWAY, Sonic has carried the torch on finding a real space for all this crap, and this third installment is a weirdly self-actualizing moment for both vidya at large and Sonic specifically. Finagling that detached yet sincere tone, measuring out the meta humor, and knowing how to tune out the human element without losing it altogether, director Jeff Fowler has been there for the whole hog thus far… all told Sonic the Hedgehog 3 isn’t too different from the last two, but it is more efficient, entertaining, stuffed with Jim Carrey jollies and naturally populated with its brightly feathered animated characters. If the first was a modest road tripper, the next some by-the-books action-adventure questing, then this is the real blockbuster of the series, one that can dunk on Disney while emulating exactly what Dreamworks wants to be every time they put out some franchise fodder. Paramount has slyly wielded Sonic to advance the art of irreverence to places where saying this is the best video game movie in forever, or the best movie you can take your kid to outside of The Wild Robot (i.e. NOTHING) is actually less than the regular ol’ praise this stupid, seriously slaphappy movie deserves.

Carrey — now going all Eddie Murphy on us in a multiplied role, his first and only since A Christmas Carol, since the alter egos of The Mask and Batman Forever don't quite count — has made Robotnik the cornerstone of his late career, and he will pry at least five good laughs out of you before the curtains close, just above par with stellar supporting silliness throughout the trilogy. But by this point (or maybe for the first time), I can say Ben Schwartz IS Sonic, I’ve warmed up to a classic “grown lady pitches her voice to sound like a little boy” for Tails as well as Idris Elba’s ironic gravity as Knuckles. You even give enough of a shit about James Marsden despite this movie spending about ten minutes with any of those hominid, family film fools. Add the kind of tragic backstory this movie affords Keanu Reeves’ Shadow (improving on Knuckles' all too similar villain redemption arc last time) and you have a winter blockbuster teeming with fun and emotion and giggles — even the visual effects look less like the usual made-for-cheap skimping on the part of Paramount (whose pockets have been picked by Tom Cruise for a couple of the most expensive movies of all time).

But it can't all be golden rings and loop-de-loops. Like its predecessors the jokes are hit and miss even if Carrey ably carries the team on his back, and as storytelling it’s inevitably somewhat stale, yet the third Sonic can’t help but put in the work between the plot, action and pauses to sort out how to be a real movie amidst all the ridiculous, rambunctious revelry. Now there’s a GIRL Hedgehog and a ROBOT Hedgehog, and the manic, mildly crude Hedgehog saga will soldier on — it seems Carrey will return from retirement every time, and until he phones it in my money's yours. I’m highlighting this flick over Barry Jenkins' Mufasa: The Lion King because frankly I couldn’t see a reason to invest in some cinematic world that has to steal its soul from other sources — Sonic 3 glides when you expect it to stumble. It's what Disney used to be, entertainment for the young and old, and until the Citizen Kane of video game feature films comes along (somehow I think A Minecraft Movie will keep us digging), I’ll keep rolling right along with this spiny blue smart-aleck.

'The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim' briefing

12/13/2024

1 ½ (out of 4)

For the vested Tolkien nerd, who could be anything but disappointed about what led to this empty, unhappy dud? Not until very close to the release of The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim did I wonder where the marketing was — I couldn’t be too surprised when the box office opening weekend was like seven million, especially you find out New Line Cinema was basically in the same situation as Sony when they clung to their Spider-Man rights by fast-tracking those Andrew Garfield reboots. The quality of The War of the Rohirrim has to be calibrated later since it’s all clouded by business decisions rather than clear creative spurs... at least in Sony’s case you have piles of comic books to flip through, meanwhile Peter Jackson’s best interns are working with about three or four pages from one of the appendices in the back of The Return of the King, and HECK I THOUGHT THE HOBBIT MOVIES WERE BLOATED! By the same math (in terms of butter being scraped over way too much bread) they could’ve split The Hobbit dozens of times instead of into infamously criticized thirds, just incalculable levels of milking that money machine bone dry!

It didn’t do anything too drastic to violate those precious few pages at its disposal and anything directly lifted from those numerable paragraphs gets a pass. But note for note, The War of the Rohirrim is a never-ending ladder of pointlessness, fan or no. Even when you get to the cinematic story and the whole gun-to-your-head moviemaking arrangement, it’s just glorified, glossy fan-fiction — working with so little is like making a movie out of an illustration on the back of Reader’s Digest. For weird standalone spin-off movies I can’t help but think of Star Wars "Stories" and all those damn streaming shows… akin to Rogue One, this is based on the nugget of a nothing idea and, along with Solo, there’s an absurd amount of teased and reworked lines meant only to repeatedly reference The Two Towers and Return of the King’s Rohirric elements. You HAD to have Helm Hammerhand’s son Fréaláf kill a big ol’ war elephant Legolas-style, and screw it, why not shoehorn wizards and resurrect Christopher Lee’s voice from beyond the grave, for no reason! I’m vexed by vacuous lore media, I can’t decide whether it’s worse as an outsider or not, regardless I sure don’t need every other exchange to mirror or reconfigure the most throwaway lines in LOTR to some degree, no matter how faint — “we must be reminiscent at every POSSIBLE MOMENT, EVERY MOMENT can be a fan service moment!”

Then you get to anime aspect, which from afar seemed benign enough, maybe even inspired, ’til you realize the studio just wanted costs minimized. Expensive things like sets, costumes, special effects and horse trainers weren't worth it to Warner Bros, and they were sadly, cynically right. Listen, I’ll not pretend I’m familiar with anime outside of basics like Hayao Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon, and I'm sure I've never touched a manga — ignorance aside this looked like Nausicaä in the worst way…. the integration of the backdrops and CGI flourishes (done beautifully like in Makoto Shinkai's works, most famously Your Name for instance) does nothing for this decades-dated, drab-ass accident of an anime. Despite a positive Japanese influence in reverence for the world, when it came to the fights this was certainly more a wuxia than English fantasy. As much as I can’t really compare it to much Eastern animation, I really don’t have to! The style is a facade, a distraction, for even at its most scenic and transporting, it’s just copy-pasted from the visual hallmarks of Jackson’s films, primarily manifested from the page to the palpable by illustrators Alan Lee and John Howe, as well as WETA Workshop creative director Richard Taylor, all of whom return here to no artistic avail after translating so much of Tolkien’s visual ideas as we know them. Their brilliant old designs are recycled to almost exclusively showcase the Rohirrim, the least fantastical culture in all of Middle Earth no matter how many eagles and mûmakils you cram in there — I’m kinda shocked the ents didn’t cameo.

This movie’s stately, pompous masquerade will have you longing for the daytime soap opera feel of the awful, overproduced Rings of Power show on Amazon Prime, picking your poison between serious sentimentality or absolute schlock. If you’re gonna fuck up Tolkien why not make it interesting? But LOTR adaptive scribe Philippa Boyens, now solely producing, has let the 'next generation' take a stab at Middle Earth, namely her untested daughter Phoebe Gittins, as well as collaborator Arty Papageorgiou, who both re-wrote the COVID script from another novice duo Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews. The four hacks stretch it as far as they can, sorry, what does that work out to, like a paragraph per person? The first act is full-scale nonsense aside from the inciting death-punch by King Hammerhand (Brian Cox) uppercutting his chubby, covetous brother Freca, leaving the fall of Edoras, its people’s exodus and the eventual siege at Helm’s Deep (including Helm slaying Dunlendings in the dead of night) by a vengeful progeny Wulf (Luke Pasqualino) to situate you’re remaining movie but JESUS, 133 minutes of this unceremonious excess? WOW a Watcher in the Water swallowed an oliphaunt… it’s all relatively inoffensive and simultaneously utterly insulting.

You can see why Fran Walsh and Jackson sat on the sidelines rather than than go all in tricking us with shameless nostalgia and a fucking UNTOLD story that is just politically desperate. From square one Miranda Otto’s narration as Eowyn (nicely echoing Galadriel’s prologue in the original trilogy) tells us not to look for said tale in writings as “there are none,” (*TITLE DROPS*), as these New Zealanders try to frame business-dictated limitations with asspull, Princess-Peach-level girlboss feminism, all for a character with literally no name? “DON’T BOTHER, IT WASN’T RECORDED BECAUSE OF SEXISM OR SOMETHING.” Sure, yeah, Rohan’s historians are misogynists didn’t you know?

And all this for what? To ensure the same hacks can help Jackson make two mother-fudging parts of The Hunt for Gollum, which will be more fan-fictiony than ever considering you’re working with ZERO PAGES IN THAT CASE RIGHT?? I hate the bitter irony of holding on to your precious piece of the IP to prevent the step-by-step dismantling of a wondrous legacy, Tolkien’s death by a thousand cuts, only to wield the knife yourself? And the Hobbit movies already drew a considerable amount of metaphorical blood. Maybe they’ve prevented Jeff Bezos from rebooting LOTR and I should actually be super grateful, not sure. But The War of the Rohirrim, Eru almighty it’s so useless I shouldn’t even be talking about it, it’s already forgotten. Like all box office failures of recent days, it was online within TWO WEEKS — just another Warner Brothers write-off, they didn’t even blink.

Cinema Briefing

'Sonic the Hedgehog 3' briefing

'The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim' briefing

To keep it brief...

Months in movies

Kino
of the Crop
(A recent selection of
consummate classics)

Cinema Briefing

'Sonic the Hedgehog 3' briefing

'The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim' briefing

To keep it brief...

Months in movies

Kinoof the Crop(A recent selection ofconsummate classics)

Kino
of the Crop
(A recent selection of
consummate classics)