Succinct Sunday: 2014 - A Small Summary (Part One)

I, Frankenstein

A pale imitation of the Underworld franchise, Aaron Eckhart plays Frankenstein's Monster, here named 'Adam' as he is caught between the fight between the righteous gargoyle empire and the demons of hell. Both want the seemingly immortal Adam to fight for their side, but since the CGI looks ropey at best, the action is boring and the central storyline wavers and runs out of steam towards the end, you really don't care on which side Adam ends up fighting. A waste of a potentially interesting and exciting concept.

Mr. Peabody & Sherman

Based on a children's stop-motion TV show about an inquisitive child and his talking dog/father-figure as they travel through time and space, learning about historical figures.  Admittedly this is more known to the Americans than us lowly British, but the voice performances are energetic, the animation is eye-catching and most importantly it doesn't talk down to the intended younger audience.  It uses humour to educate the kids as well as entertain.  More stuff like this is needed, Hollywood!

Anchorman 2 : The Legend Continues

Lightning unfortunately continues to not strike twice for Will Ferrell as Anchorman 2 follows in the footsteps of Land of the Lost, The Campaign and The Other Guys in creating a dumb guy-comedy that fails to live up to the unexpected hit that was the original Anchorman. Whilst the up-scaled news-crew battle is fun to watch with it's impressive cameo appearances, I still hope that this will prove to be the last of Ferrell's dumb-guy comedies. Anchorman was a fantastic fluke, and it should have been left like that.

Ride Along 

Newest American hot commodity, the comedian Kevin Hart plays a cowardly video-game nerd alongside tough cop future brother-in-law Ice Cube who takes him on the titular ride-along to show him some real-life GTA and make him prove himself worthy of his sister's hand in marriage. However, they get involved in corrupt police schemes, blah blah blah. The film is boring, repetitive and ludicrous. I honestly don't get the hype surrounding Kevin Hart but maybe I'm just out of the loop. I'd much rather recommend 22 Jump Street instead, but that's still to come...

The Borderlands

Found-footage film based around a supposedly haunted church in the Yorkshire dales. The film is obviously acted by unimpressive amateurs, but the scares and tension are well-constructed and developed as similarities to An American Werewolf in London and Poltergeist start appearing, all culminating in a finale that leaves most baffled.

An impressive attempt, but ultimately disappointing.

Muppets Most Wanted

Kermit and the crew are back, but there is treachery afoot! With the help of Ricky Gervais, a jewel-thief imposter has locked the frog away in a Russian gulag, and is impersonating him as head of the Muppet gang! There is a definite lack of Jason Segel and Amy Adams, instead replaced by Gervais, Tina Fey and the always amazing Ty Burrell, leading to a lack of emotional heart that the first film had in buckets. The resulting film is still warm, colourful and lovely, but a definite downgrade from the revival film a few years ago.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

This film annoyed me more than any other film this year.  It has all the components needed to outdo it's Tobey Maguire predecessor, but again, it fails to connect to the audience at any level and has a laughably weak, badly-written script.  Andrew Garfield is a fantastic Peter Parker, Emma Stone is great foil as Gwen Stacy, and Jamie Foxx gives a brilliant performance as the mumbling and shy Max before his turn into the boring villain Electro.  His origin scene and transformation is probably the best scene in the film, but the resulting super-charged smurf has no real believable motive for the rest of the film and comes across as wasted potential.


That combined with a shoe-horned Harry Osborn story, and the hardly-featured Rhino villain makes the film seem overblown and uninteresting.  A large criticism is that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 simply feels like one big preview for another film.  Similar to Iron Man 2, nothing truly important happens, but sly mentions are given to upcoming villains and story-lines.  It never feels like a film in it's own right and I could never start enjoying it. Too much ominous foreboding, too much nonsensical plot twists and definitely not enough care given to the script.

Stay tuned for more succinct reviews this time next week!  Until next time folks, thanks for reading!

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