Morgan Freeman has been in a lot of films. Many good, many bad. It feels almost silly to use a Morgan Freeman film tag link to take us to a forgotten mid 90s action movie but when you see he’s co-starring with Keanu Reeves and Rachel Weisz… what more could you ask for?
I think it’s fair to say this is not any of them’s greatest cinematic piece but neither is it their worst. This is a competent, pacy thriller with some twists and turns. Weisz is a nery scientist (of course), Keanu is a baffled looking techy (of course) and Morgan Freeman is a wise and knowing gentleman (of course). Some kind of infinite energy source has been discovered. Cue goons, explosions, set-ups and chase sequences.
It’s decent. The worst you can really say about it is it hails from a action movie era when female characters were universally pathetic. Weisz is massively underused here and basically swings between looking scared or relieved for most of the film.
Linked by Morgan Freeman to...
Is this a good film? Surely not really. It’s definitely fun. And I think it’s probably better than it really has any right to be. Cash in crossovers from toys and games are pretty much universally awful. But this isn’t. Somehow, they managed to keep it just silly enough that it feels joyful and yet not so silly that it feels like a waste of your time. It’s a perfect plane movie.
And it has a cast of thousands of big name actors, which makes it a surprisingly useful film tag pick.
Linked by James Franco (a bit) and Alison Brie (again) to...
A very good film tag entry! Though Alison Brie maybe didn’t have the biggest role in this one, she was certainly a central character and just look at the options for film tag out from here!
I don’t know how much sense this will make to anyone who hasn’t seen The Room. I imagine it’d still be an entertaining story but you’d definitely be missing something. The completely bonkers film project, mysteriously funded, full of terrible dialogue and worse sex scenes… it’s hard to describe it in a way that remotely does it justice. This film gets a lot of its laughs for free just by lifting scenes wholesale from The Room (the credits sequence side-by-side reshoots are incredible). Both Francos do great jobs as the leads, but its the reactions from cast and crew that really make this film - how weird must the real life experience have been?
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A better one that we’ve had in a while in film tag. I’d read the description and feared it was going to be a hard and very heavy watch. The pre-credits scene does nothing to change that - leering creeps in a club argue over who’s going to take advantage of a drunk single woman. Thankfully, this the tone shifts a bit and moves towards a revenge-thriller, all the while hammering home the message that these men’s behaviour is very much not OK.
It’s a decent film, but after that first tonal shift, it never really went anywhere very unexpected. We’d pretty much predicted the plot after the first 20 minutes or so. Sure, there were some unpredictable details but nothing that you couldn’t sort of guess would happen. We spent much of the 2hr runtime wondering if it would throw us off but it never did. As such, I reckon it could probably have been trimmed down a bit - there’s probably a great 80 minute film in there somewhere.
Linked by Carey Mulligan to...
Oh dear.
This has all the elements it should need - excellent source material, great cast, art-deco period detail - but has been so thoroughly Baz Luhrmanned that it feels like a bit of a slog. It’s far too long. Baz’s “desire to blend the music of the Jazz Age, associated with the 1922 setting of the story, with a modern spin” is pretty clumsy. Worst of all, though, is the lavish quantities of astonishingly bad CGI. It’ everywhere. Every external shot of the city or Gatsby’s castle. The car journeys. The water. It’s mind blowing that someone looked at the crummy computer rendering and thought “yeah, that’s good enough”. If you can’t do it on a computer, do it on a set!
Linked by Leonardo DiCaprio to...