And here is part two of my round-up of 2014's other films. That way I can make a fresh start on 2015!
We left things at The Amazing Spider-Man 2, where shall we pick up from...?
Transcendence
Christopher
Nolan's resident cinematographer, Wally Pfister, moves into the
director's chair for his directorial début. After he is shot in a
terrorist attack, Johnny Depp's consciousness is downloaded onto a
computer. However he begins using his new omnipotent power to change
the world.
An intriguing idea behind the ethics of artificial
intelligence, although it never picks up the pace to be an awesome action
film, nor gets into the issues at hand to be a thought-provoking sci-fi. It just flounders in the middle.
Pompeii
Basically
Titanic with a volcano. Lower-class guy (Game of Thrones' Jon Snow)
falls in love with Roman princess (Emily Browning), annoying the
lady's fiancée (Kiefer 'Jack Bauer' Sutherland).
But can their love
overcome such a powerful force of nature?
No. It's a f##king
volcano.
Skip to the last 30 minutes for some half-decent special
effects.
Godzilla
Such
potential. The director of the sublime Monsters, Bryan Cranston
straight off his Breaking Bad fame and one of the most famous movie
monsters in the world. What could go wrong? Well, a lot really.
I
understand why the director Gareth Edwards would want to recreate the
teasing-beasty approach that worked in Monsters and apply it to the titular monster, but if you're going to push
human-drama for an hour first, make it damn interesting! My main gripe was why wasn't Bryan Cranston the protagonist? Why was it the personality
vacuum that is Aaron Taylor-Johnson? Don't get me wrong; it's
infinitely better than Godzilla (1998); the cinema literally shook
when Godzilla made his entrance, with the audience cheering! However when walking out of the auditorium, it just felt disappointing.
X-Men:
Days of Future Past
By
far, the best X-Men film since X-Men 2.
It uses all of it's
characters well, and paces the story well enough that you are never
bored or questioning logic. An impressive attempt at joining the two
X-Men film timelines with Old Magneto/Xavier communicating with Young
Erik/Charles.
I still don't understand the sudden importance of
Mystique in these new films, apart from Jennifer Lawrence being the "It Girl" at the moment. However they have created a way of removing
X-Men: The Last Stand from the film's history, and that's just fine with
me. However they will never erase the memories... Fuck you, Brett Ratner.
A
Million Ways To Die In The West
Seth
MacFarlane follows up Ted with AMWTDITW, a comedy western, mainly
based off how awful it must have been to live back in the Wild West (A joke that wears thin after around fifteen minutes)
I expected a
bit more from MacFarlane now that he is finally in front of the
camera instead of voicing animated characters and he is hardly
leading man material for the future. The film relies too much on tired, crude jokes typical of current MacFarlane humour instead of the satirical, aserbic humour that I saw in early-2000s MacFarlane.
22
Jump Street
The
tongue-in-cheek sequel to one of the surprise successes of 2012, 21
Jump St. Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum return as the central cops
going undercover at a college campus, being juvenile and immature but
loving it.
The film contains more nods and winks to the audience
than any film I've seen in a long time and I laughed all the way
through.
If you have not yet seen either of these series, you are
missing out.
How
To Train Your Dragon 2
HTTYD2
disappointed me.
Not in terms of visual quality or the amount of fun
I had whilst watching it. But in terms of how much story potential
lay ahead of them after the first film, and they didn't utilise it at
all.
They introduced Hiccup's mother and a random bad guy wanting to
control all dragons in the world, but apart from that, it was just
more of the same. It should have taken inspiration from Kung Fu
Panda and it's sequel, now that is how you do it.
The
Inbetweeners 2
Speaking
of 'more-of-the-same' sequels, here is the familiar scenario of a
British sitcom taking it's characters and placing them in a foreign
country, but instead of Ibiza, it's Australia.
Cue jokes about
kangaroos and boomerangs, right? Nope, it doesn't even utilise it's
setting once, apart from saying a British accent is all the
qualification needed to get a job in Australia.
It might as well
have been set in England. Attempting to cash in on the most
successful British comedy by making a 'paint-by-numbers' sequel has
resulted in just disappointment.
The
Expendables 3
Old
people with guns! Run!
Sly and the boys are back, but after a bloody
and bruised mission, Sly figures he has to bring some new blood in. However when presumed-dead Mel Gibson turns up alive and with a
target on Sly's back, he has to match experience with youth.
The
most 'PG-rated' Expendables film yet, and ironically, the one I have
most enjoyed. Maybe because one of the new Expendables is the
incredible and charismatic Antonio Banderas.
I mean, he could do a
Wrigley's Extra advert and I'd love it!... Wait, he's done what?
Before
I Go To Sleep
This
film's title almost wrote it's review for it.
However there was a
small interesting plot within that kept my attention going
throughout. The film is not mind-blowing and I've been told by all
that read the book that it's a must-read and a page-turner so I can
only imagine that the adaptation lost something in translation.
Colin
Firth is brilliant as usual, however Mark Strong is underused and I
would have loved to have seen the Nicole Kidman that I saw in Stoker,
instead of the one that starred here.
A
Walk Amongst The Tombstones
Liam
Neeson broke his own 'dramatic leading man' mould when he starred as 'Taken' in Taken (I think he's called Brian, but I just call him Taken
anyway). However, with The Grey (Taken vs. Wolves), Taken 2 (AKA
Took), Non-Stop (AKA Taken On A Plane) and the upcoming Taken 3
(sorry, Tak3n), he seems to have fallen into another typecasting.
A.W.A.T.T. is a similar set-up to those previously mentioned but this
time, Neeson plays a washed-up alcholic former-lawman who has lost
his family, trying to find redemption by saving a young girl. Talk
about different! The film is dark and intense in places, with
genuinely disturbing villains, but apart from that, just watch Taken
again.
Fury
Brad
Pitt, Shia LeBeouf, Michael Pena, Jon Bernthal and Percy Jackson
operate a tank in the closing stages of the Second World War. But
no, this is not a continuation or a sequel to Inglorious Basterds.
The film is supposed to be about brotherhood and fraternity between
men in the trenches, but when the script doesn't make the characters
likeable, funny or endearing, it's destined to fail. Whilst there
are many tense moments and impressive battle scenes during the film,
it misses the mark when you don't really care if the characters make
it through it or not.
Although there are some dynamite moustaches in
this film. Take a bow, Mr. LeBeouf.
Horrible
Bosses 2
Everything
about this film told me that it was a bad sequel. The script was
sloppy, the central plot ludicrous and the direction was confused
throughout.
But there's something about Jason Bateman, Charlie Day
and Jason Sudeikis that made me not care. Maybe it was their charm,
their chemistry or my residual goodwill from their performances in
shows such as Arrested Development, 30 Rock and It's Always Sunny In
Philadelphia, but I found them hilarious.
Throw in a charismatic
performance from Chris Pratt and I was entertained all the way
through this film. Damn me.
The
Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies
Stone-cold
proof that this trilogy could have easily been confined to two films.
I had never been bored by a Lord of the Rings film before this but
the mindless action scenes that made Return of the King so
spectacular and grand, just made this film seem overblown and
over-long.
The mightily impressive Smaug is restricted to the first
ten minutes of the film, the boring relationship between dwarf and
elf is drawn out to being half of the film, and things are left on a
really confusing and contradictory note.
I wanted to love this
trilogy as much as the original LOTR, but they were just too
immature, drawn out and stuffed with unnecessary filler.
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Well that's it for 2014! Here's to 2015! Avengers 2, Jurassic World, Star Wars Episode VII, I cannot wait!
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