Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5

Bottom Line: Tom Cruise is not funny.  Neither is anyone else in this movie.  Some of the action is pretty cool, though.

Once upon a time, there was a movie called “The Mummy” starring Brendan Fraser and it was good.  Not great, but good.  It had that perfect mix of oddball corniness and action that requires a sense of comic timing and versatility that goes unappreciated until a movie like “The Mummy” starring Tom Cruise comes along.  Tom Cruise is a fairly accomplished dramatic actor and he has also made a name for himself in the action movie category as well, but by moving from a serious action star to a comedic action star, he has finally found his weak spot.  Now, you might think that a poor comedic action star might still not ruin a movie if you surround him by actual comedic actors and beef up the writing a bit.  And you would be correct as can be seen by the success of the “Mission Impossible” franchise with the addition of Simon Pegg, among other.  They tried that in this movie by adding Jake Johnson of “New Girl” fame.  Johnson has a decent comedic repertoire, but man does he fall completely flat as Cruise’s sidekick.  Every single attempt to be funny in this movie goes over as well as a lead balloon to the point that you almost have to laugh at how poor the comedic attempts are, when you can recognize them as such.

Luckily, the movie isn’t a complete waste of time.  The back story of the Big Bad, Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) is pretty cool, if not nearly fleshed out (ha ha, get it, because she’s a mummy?) enough. There is also some decent action to be had, filled with rats and zombie-mummies and plummeting airplaines, but that can’t quite save the movie from the likes of questionable plot points and questionabler appearances by the likes of Russell Crowe in an attempt to make a franchise of the whole affair.

Despite all this, I actually recommend that you do see “The Mummy”, only the 1999 version with Brendan Fraser.  You should mostly pretend that the 2017 version never existed.  And hopefully, the studio execs will as well.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: Finally, a solid DC Comics movie.  Solid story.  Good acting.  Wonderful supporting cast.  Gal Gadot IS Wonder Woman.

Never let it be said that DC can’t make a good Superhero movie.  All it takes is a female Superhero and a female directory.  The director of this delightful movie is Patti Jenkins.  You may know her from her disturbing directorial debut film, “Monster”, about female serial killer Aileen Wuornos.  And that’s it.  She’s directed a few TV movies and shows, but nothing big screen until “Wonder Woman”.  All I have to say about that is get this woman a blank check and a script to her liking.  She should be doing more stuff.  I hope her lack of directorial credits is of her own choosing and not something more nefarious.

“Wonder Woman” begins on the island of Themyscira, where the Amazon women have lived, training and preparing for the day Ares returns to Earth to wreak havoc upon the world.  This entire back story is wonderfully retold in a sort of moving Renaissance painting style that is both effective and beautiful.  There are, in fact, many scenes like this where you can tell that a lot of love went into the labor of bringing this movie to the screen.  Themyscira itself is breathtakingly gorgeous and scene after scene on the island is so full of detail that you can get lost in it all.  The island is, unfortunately, made mostly out of whole cloth so you will be booking your airfare tickets in vain if you choose to try to visit the real world Themyscira.  Not that I scoured the credits and the interwebs looking for clues as to where to find this island paradise…  It definitely has influences of Italian islands with some Southeast Asian flavor thrown in for spectacle, so those destinations will have to do.

Diana becomes Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) when she helps Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), a World War I pilot/spy who crash lands on the island while being pursued by Germans leading to one of the most badassed movie fight scenes ever devised in which the Amazons square off against the Germans, escape the Amazons as she is convinced it is their duty to fight in the war and stop what surely must be Ares returned at last.  Chris Pine is a wonderful supporting actor opposite Gal Gadot, but Gal Gadot just steals it.  The looks.  The personality.  The accent.  Everything about her was just perfect for Wonder Woman.  As a friend said, “Gal Gadot’s personality such that you forget her looks (that’s a compliment!) but every now and then you’d catch her legs in that costume and…hot d-mn!!!”  The three exclamation marks are hers and well warranted.  I’d also like to give a little shout out to Lucy Davis who plays Etta, Steve Trevor’s secretary.  She’s there for comic relief and doesn’t have a large role, but she plays wonderfully off both Gadot and Pine.  She was absolutely delightful.

Wonder Woman, the Superhero, and thus “Wonder Woman”, the movie, does suffer from many of the problems that plague DC Comics Superheroes in general in that her powers are largely undefined.  See Superman and Green Lantern for other examples.  This leads to an epic final battle in which two massively powered individuals with undefined abilities square off against each other and inevitably leads to them throwing each other around and flinging impossibly large objects at each other until someone finally succumbs to one of the other’s ill-defined powers for ill-defined reasons.  But, while “Wonder Woman” the movie has that, it is kept on even footing with the all too mortal humans quietly saving the day in the background.  It’s a nice touch that other Superhero films often forget.  It also ends in one of the most beautiful cinematographic visuals I have ever seen.  In it, Wonder Woman is standing all badass in front of a massive crater where Ares was blasted into oblivion and the sun is rising in the distance and the battle’s wounded are struggling to their feet on both sides of her.  Like the Amazon backstory at the beginning of the movie, it is very Renaissance painting-ish and makes a good bookend for the movie.

I am so happy this film is doing well.  Not only because it is awesome and should rank up there as one of the best Superhero films of all time, but because it’s also pissing off all the right people (or I guess wrong people) for all the right reasons by its success.  And while I, for one, will celebrate this momentous movie making miracle of women headlining a male dominated genre and being badass on the silver screen and making obscene amounts of money all at once, I can’t help but recall comedy maven Michelle Wolf’s words, “You know when it will feel like women are equal at the box office? When we get to make a BAD superhero movie and then immediately make another bad one.  Men get chance after chance to make superhero movies.  No one left crappy “Batman vs. Superman” movie saying ‘well, I guess we’re done making man movies’.”  Watch the whole thing.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 1/5 stars

Bottom Line: Sloppy. Lazy. Dull.  Improbable.

“Alien: Covenant” is a story about man’s hubris and how it inevitably will lead to our downfall.  In it, Ridley Scott attempts to make a movie so bad under the assumption that his subjects are so dense that they will go see an movie with the name “Alien” in it just because there were once two good movies in the series.  Ridley Scott was correct.  Humanity is doomed.  I think the movie itself was also about man’s hubris, but I was too busy rolling my eyes and wanting to punch something to much pay attention.

If you have seen ‘Prometheus”, I’m sorry.  But also, you’ve already seen “Alien: Covenant”.  Only this time, instead of finding a mysterious ship and acting stupid, a whole new set of supposedly smart people find a mysterious planet and act stupid.  Let’s back up a bit, though.  The movie begins with a bit of a preamble in which the creator of androids first brings Michael Fassbender online and treats him like a dick.  The purpose of this scene is to make the movie over two hours long.  Michael Fassbender takes the name David which, if you will recall, was the android in Prometheus.  Fast forward some indeterminate amount of time and now we’re on board the Covenant, a colony ship en route to planet QRQ51521 or some-such.  And Michael Fassbender is on board!  Only, he’s totally not David, but Walter this time and thus totally trustworthy.  Or is he?  Dun dun DUNNNNNN!  While in the middle of this journey, the ship is subjected to a one in a billion star event while at its most vulnerable, recharging its batteries, which kills a bunch of people and wakes up the crew from hibernation.

Let’s meet the crew, shall we?  The crew consists of: one char-boiled captain cooked in his own juices for five minutes just because it would look cool, a first officer who you should know is some sort of religious and is certain that is the reason why he isn’t captain but now he is since the ship decided to have a barbecue, at least two married couples which seems like a really bad idea for people who are expected to make life and death decisions for others, another couple who are bumpin’ uglies and thus must be punished for it in true horror cliche fashion, Michael Fassbender, and various other people who will sacrifice their lives in the name of stupidity.

While doing repairs to their ship, one crew member hears a transmission of a John Denver song on his piddly little space suit while the massive ship doesn’t hear it at all.  Because reasons.  The transmission is coming from a planet that all of their scans somehow completely missed and is almost perfect in every single way and is much better than the crappy planet they were planning on inhabiting and screw their orders and let’s go check it out!  Up to this precise moment of the movie, we’re still kind of ok.  Sure, they’re not making good decisions, but they’re at least in the realm of probable bad decisions that a crew in their position might make.  Then they land on the planet.

Here is just a sampling of the bad decisions these people make.

• They go down to the planet, which is a tempest of storms and hurricanes and electricity.  It’s going to be a scary, bumpy ride and communications will be almost impossible at times.  Let’s do this.
• They land on the planet.  You might think, “Well, sure, why wouldn’t they?”  Ah, but you’re forgetting, my friend, that they’re there to track down a transmission and it turns out that the transmission is coming from a crashed ship not far from a massive dead city that if they even bothered doing a fly-by first, they would have discovered had plenty of space to land.
• They separate from the group.  This place looks like a great spot to take water samples on this completely unexplored planet.  You guys go on ahead.
• They romp through the planet like a dog rolling in its own shit.  Let me just go take a piss and dig my foot really deep in this mass of weird spore-like looking filth.  I, too, am going to put my face up really close to this mass of weird spore-like looking filth and poke at it.
• They interchangeably freak the fuck out and behave calmly whenever the mood fits.
• They calmly follow a complete stranger who appears from nowhere without questioning where he came from or how he got there.  Spoiler alert: It’s Michael Fassbender, er, David.
• They separate from the group.  “You know what, I know I just watched my friends die and we’re in this massive dead city, but what I could really go for is a nice bath.”  I’ll be right back.  No you won’t.
• They continue to listen to David even though he repeated lies to him.  “Oh, here, follow me down into this dank hole so I can show you something after you just saw me communicating with the alien that has been making a smorgasbord of your crew.”  “OK!”

There’s plenty more, but I’m  making myself plenty angry reliving the movie so I will stop there.  There is no good reason to see this movie.  Oh, wait, no, there is one.  With every stupid, preventable death, you will secretly whisper to yourself, “Thank god they died!  They were intolerably stupid.”

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Reasonably fun and funny.  Goldie Hawn and Amy Schumer have good chemistry and deserve better material.

I love how easily Amy Schumer can slip into the oblivious white woman role.  She is very obviously not that type of woman given her writing abilities, but she puts the role on like she were slipping into her favorite sweatpants and sweater.  In “Snatched”, she plays Emily Middleton, who is, you will be shocked to find out, an oblivious white woman.  Emily is recently broken up with her boyfriend with whom she planned to go to Ecuador on vacation.  In desperate need of a traveling companion, she decides to bring her mom, Linda (Goldie Hawn).  While there, they are kidnapped, held for ransom, and hilariously escape.  As a side note, it was really great to see Goldie Hawn in a movie again.

The movie was written by Katie Dippold, who has a few decent female buddy comedy movies under her belt now, including “The Heat” and “Ghostbusters”, but she was also a writer on “Parks and Recreation” and “MadTV” before that, so she’s a comedy writing pro at this point.  Dippold’s humor is more awkward funny than laugh out loud funny.  Having a mom and daughter combo certainly sets up the possibility for the awkwardness to be ramped up to 11.  To some extent, Dippold delivers.  There are scenes like the breakup and family dinner that are awkwardly funny in all the right ways.  But then there are scenes like the suntan lotion slathering scene and the tapeworm scene that are just forced and not terribly funny.

The movie did raise an important question that I had never thought about.  Say you were kidnapped and managed to escape and phone the United States State Department to let them know you were kidnapped.  What would they actually do?  What can they do?  In the movie, Linda and Emile are told to get to the nearest U.S. Consulate as soon as possible.  I have no idea if that is actually what would happen, but it feels about right.

If you’re jonesing for an Amy Schumer comedy, I’d recommend renting “Trainwreck” which is far superior to this movie.  “Snatched” does, however, have a certain amount of charm which makes it worth watching, even if it’s not the type of comedy that sticks with you afterwards.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 5/5 stars

Bottom Line: Funnier, actionier, and Grootier than the first movie.

The Guardians of the Galaxy are back and they’re saving the universe once again with their acerbic wit, droll humor, and viciously funny put-downs.  That’s just how they roll and because of it, you would be hard pressed to find a better movie from a sheer entertainment value point of view.

The movie sets the tone quickly with Baby Groot dancing through the opening credits as the rest of the Guardians battle an inter-dimensional, power crystal hungry, fully tentacled blob of a monster.  The barbed comments and witty rejoinders don’t stop from that point forward.  Even in the midst of violent action, the movie often pauses to exact humor upon the  audience.  Anybody have some tape?

There is also a plot!  Well, there’s kind of a plot.  It’s more of an excuse to get the Guardians from one adventure to another, but it involves Star-lord finding his father.  Don’t get me wrong, is a fine plot, at least as far as movie action hero plots go, but you’ll be having too much fun watching the movie to much care about it.  You’ll be enjoying watching the Guardians make friends of enemies and enemies of friends and frenemies of just about everyone else.

i still have my usual complaints about the action sequences being a little too busy and hard to follow, but I think they did a better job at this one than the first movie.  I think a lot of this has to do with many of the scenes being taken literally as a video game.  It’ll make sense when you watch the movie.  Also, though, the action felt a bit slowed down, which I’m hoping is a trend instead of me just getting used to the fast paced, can’t follow anything type of action.

What an absolute delight of a movie!  Go out and see this film, you won’t be disappointed.  Volume 2 has every bit as much re-watchability as the first and I foresee a “Guardians of the Galaxy” marathon in my future.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 1/5 stars

Bottom Line: What. The. Hell. Was. That.

“The Circle” has one thing and only one thing going for it.  There are some beautiful scenes of Emma Watson kayaking near the Golden Gate Bridge and various other natural landscapes.  Yet somehow, it even manages to ruin that.  This is a complete mess of a movie.

Let’s focus on the characters.  Or should I say programmable robots?  Because I’m not sure human beings were used in the filming of this movie.  Characters need motives and reasons for their actions while this movie has them completely changing personality from scene to scene with little to no explanation.  Mae (Emma Watson) goes from questioning the culture of the company to completely drinking the kool-aid for the company culture and does so after literally having a conversation with another questioner of the company, Ty (John Boyega), in which they mock the whole kool-aid drinking culture.  Mae got the job because of her best friend Annie (Karen Gillan) who starts as a workaholic high level exec and immediately changes to being Mae’s enemy and suffers a nervous breakdown and questions everything about the company.  Ty, who is supposed to be super brilliant, stands powerless as he watches all this stuff he rails against happen even though it’s within his power to change everything pretty much at any time, but he waits for Mae to have a change of conscious in order to do so.

There’s supposed to be a moral to this story, I’m sure, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is.  As best I can tell, the moral is “Technology is good…sometimes?” or perhaps “Privacy is good…sometimes?”.  To which I can only reply, “Thank you, Captain Obvious!”  And those question marks definitely belong because the movie leaves no clear answer.  About anything.  There is no depth to the story as it tries to beat you over the head with these morals through painful scene after painful scene.  You end up not giving a damn about any of the characters at all because of it, even Mae’s dad who has MS.

I can think of many things you would enjoy more than going to see “The Circle”.  Get that root canal that you’ve been putting off.  Spend some time with your racist uncle.  Take a tour of a wastewater treatment facility.  Read the entirety of Trumps Twitter account.  Whatever it is, you’ve made a better decision than my seeing “The Circle”.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A little too all over the place, but with some terrific scenes.  Plus, it’s a true-ish story.

“The Lost City  of Z” is one of those movies that I’m not sure translated well from the book to the screen.  Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) is an interesting character and his life is certainly worth reading about, but it was also very chaotic and jumps from continent to continent so much that scales of time and distance seem lost when on the screen.  The movie does a fairly decent job of managing this sprawling story, but I can’t help think it would have made a better mini-series than movie, especially when episodes like World War I seem kind of superfluous to the main story.

Percy Fawcett is a man of contradictions.  He is driven and dedicated, ambitious and more than a little arrogant.  He dedicated his life to finding a lost city in the Amazon and trying to convince the mighty British Empire that the native Amazonians are not the savages his peers claim them to be.  But his wife, oh, she belongs in the home barefoot and pregnant and tending to however many broodlings he manages to pump into her during his sparse visits home.  It is safe to say that Mr. Fawcett is slightly more enlightened than his contemporaries.  Baby steps.

There are some wonderful scenes in this movie, the best of which is when Fawcett is trying to convince the Royal Geographic Society to fund his trip to find his lost city.  It reminds you of just how weird the British Parliamentary system is.  Another is when his wife is trying to convince him to let her go back to South America with him next time.  But they are interspersed within a lot of views of traveling down a river or mini-National Geographic specials as they interact with native villages.  All of this adds to the uneven feel of the movie.

So is this movie worth watching?  Maybe?  I’d say as a movie for sheer entertainment, no.  But as a historical drama delving into the goings on and mores of early 20th century Great Britain, the movie has a lot to offer and it certainly piqued my interest in reading more about Percy Fawcett.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: Good action.  Crappy plot.  Vin Diesel should not be allowed to speak.

You know going in to any “The Fast and the Furious” movies that you’re in for a certain level of ridiculousness.  That level is high.  Very high.  If you accept that, you can usually have a lot of fun watching these movies.  Not even that acceptance could save this movie.

Before I get into the plot, let me start by saying, man, is Vin Diesel a bad actor.  He is only capable of saying three words with any sort of range or emotion and those words are “I am Groot!”  The man is the luckiest SOB in the world that this whole mythology was built around these movies with him in the lead role.  Fortuitously, the writers realized both what they had and how bad Vin Diesel was and developed a strong supporting cast of hardbodies to pick up his slack, including Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham.  And, in what must have been a ‘you’re going to pay me how much?” moment, Charlize Theron is also in this movie as the main villain,

I know, I know, making fun of the plot of a “Fast and Furious” movie is kind of like mocking the athletic ability of the kid that always gets picked last in gym class, but man, what a ripe target!  You may know that a lot of the premise for the series is based off of the “do anything for family” creed.  Well, throw that right out the window!  In this one, Dom (Vin Diesel) is blackmailed by Cypher (Charlize Theron) to turn against his family and steal an EMP device from his team, the execution of which causes Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) to be sent to jail.  Bye bye, family!  Dom, of course, keeps the reasons behind the blackmail secret from his family and plays the perfect villain because reasons!  Of course, he’s not really a villain and he hatches a hair-brained plot to make everything right and save the day at the last minute and everything is executed perfectly.

But you don’t want to hear about the plot!  You want to hear about the car chase scenes!  I’m happy to report that they are quite entertaining.  You have the necessary drag racing for ownership of a car that has a lot of “been there, done that” to it, but that’s more to satisfy a certain demographic of the audience than to add to the movie.  The best part by far is the final chase which has Dekard (Jason Statham) hand-to-hand fighting his way out of an airplane while carrying a baby.  Statham has some fine comedic chops.  Really, though, the entire final chase is terrific and an honorable mention should be paid to the scene where hundreds of cars are hacked and go careening through the streets of New York en masse.

Money making idea!  Take all of the “Fast and the Furious” movies string them together and remove everything except the car chase/action scenes.  I think I would pay for that.