richard_nicky Reviews

The I-Land (2019)

Just wait for episode 3

[8/10 · 14 September 2019]

I'm making my way through this series and enjoying it more and more. Don't take things at face value, it may look like a bad reality show, but clearly the island itself is a set-up, reminiscent of an Agatha Christie plot, Maze Runner or the Hunger Games. By episode three you start getting mind-bending plot twists that put it firmly in a different league.

Overall a good imaginative plot, so even if the acting and storyline may seem unrealistic at the outset, you need to give it some time or you'll be making an over-hasty judgement call.

Bumblebee (I) (2018)

This movie is not really about robots!

[8/10 · 4 January 2019]

If you were expecting a movie about robots bashing the living daylights out of eachother for two hours, you might be disappointed. This movie is really about the main female lead and her relationships with her mother, brother, dead dad, step-dad and the boy next door. The robots are fairly incidental to the plot, and even the bad "shoot-first and don't ask any questions" military hard-neck turns out to have a nicer side at the end.

Of course the robot action sequences are visually superb, if scientifically dubious, but what makes this film really enjoyable, and elevates it from all its siblings in the frnachise, is the way the characters interwine and cover a lot of interesting emotional ground.

Got top marks from my 11 year old daughter.

Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018)

A little preachy with some brilliant moments

[7/10 · 2 December 2018]

Took my two kids ages 6 & 11 to see this: it was fun watching them and seeing how the movie either enthralled them and made them laugh, or was just plain boring with some long preachy passages.

It definitely has some brilliant hilarious moments - but the moralising deep questions about friendship and growing up are tedious and lose the sheer unadulterated fun of the fist movie.

Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006)

A good sequel

[6/10 · 3 April 2006]

This film is a good sequel, but it never quite reaches the cracking fun heights of its forebear. Our previous heroes are all there, along with a few new ones, but I didn't find myself bonding much to the new characters.

Scrat-the-Squirrel is as ever hilarious, but he's more obviously used as patched-in scenes to liven up the otherwise rather slow pace of the film. I felt that if you put all the Scrat sequences together you'd have an excellent short! Technically the graphics are very good, and it must have taken a deliberate effort to preserve the slightly dated style of the previous film. However, CPUs must have been humming to process every droplet as water splashes are clearly the big innovation for this movie.

Kids will love the film and burst out laughing at the slapstick humour, parents will sit through it painlessly enough, enjoying a few more subtle jokes, but overall Ice Age "The Meltdown" doesn't quite live up to the very high expectations of folk who've seen the first film.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)

The worst film I have ever seen

[1/10 · 4 September 2005]

Of the 1000s of films I have seen in the last 20 years as an avid film-goer, this film stands out unequivocally as the worst ever.

Less than 5mn into the film, the graphic nature of what was being portrayed made me wish I was somewhere else - I only didn't leave the cinema because out of respect for the people in the row.

Throughout the film you will be exposed to gratuitous and vile unpleasantness - the sort of thing any normal, sane person would probably rather not consciously experience - this ranges from eating excrement to cannibalism.

You could of course watch it out of some morbid intellectual curiosity, but you would then really have a number of better things to do with your life.