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Star Wars: Acolyte (S1:E1 & E2)

Little Orphan Raggedy Ann and her very intimidating moptop are on a dark side-filled rage quest for revenge against the four Jedi Masters who betrayed her. Little does she know that her identical twin sister survived the fire that killed the rest of their family when they were children, and now the two find themselves on opposite sides, each looking for justice on their own terms.

Star Wars: Acolyte (S1: E1 & E2) Review

The original Star Wars (eventually retitled A New Hope in 1981) was objectively imperfect. Some of its dialogue is rather cringeworthy, and some narrative elements are less than developed (ex: Luke being more upset over the death of a man he’s known for a few days than Leia is about the death of her entire planet, including her parents). However, its grand scale, fun characters, perfect score, and rousing story make it easy to overlook these imperfections and enjoy Episode IV and its two sequels for the epic and sweeping adventures they are.

While the first season, and in a small part the second, of The Mandalorian managed to capture the scope and texture of the Star Wars universe unlike anything since the original trilogy, the unfortunate reality is that small screen Star Wars has been largely a bitter disappointment. The Book of Boba Fett was a mess, Obi-Wan Kenobi was a canon-busting disaster, and Ahsoka was an uninspired low-T vanity project.

This brings us to the first two episodes of the fan-fiction cosplay that is The Acolyte. Between Kathleen Kennedy and Disney setting the bar so low with their slow, torturous murder of Lucasfilm, it’s difficult to be disappointed by this latest offering. From its ill-fitting Wookie costume to its charismas-vacuum characters and its laugh-out-loud dialogue, The Acolyte could be worse, but with an average budget of three-quarters of a million dollars per minute, it manages to eek its way to mediocre.

No single element of the show can be targeted as the anchor that keeps it from achieving greatness. Instead, Star Wars: The Acolyte is wholly middling on every level. Amandla Stenberg, who plays the leads (yeah, you read that correctly), is as adequate a performer as anyone else in the program, but her flawless complexion and tiny tiny stature combined with the horror show that is her evil COVID-gator costume, ridiculous Rick James braids, and some truly horrendous dialogue relegate her to passable. Furthermore, there’s nothing about her pretty face or soft feminine physique that’s remotely menacing or that speaks to a hard life of loss and pain.

Stenberg isn’t alone; amid the Jedi Knight’s Abercrombie and Fitch robes and the poorly crafted story, no one’s performance exceeds sufficient. Accentuating the show’s general blandness is that no environment seems real. Everything looks like a set on a soundstage.

Yet, most of these weaknesses could be overlooked if the fight photography and story structure weren’t so hackneyed. The fight choreography is structurally fine, if uninspired and derivative, but its timing is sorely lacking. So far, the fights lack the crispness to excel past the practice stage. Instead, you can practically hear the performers counting the moves in their heads (step, 2, 3. block 2, 3. 1st position, 2, 3. etc.), and everything has a waltz-like metronome count feel as a result.

Moreover, its filming leaves much to be desired. Each physical conflict consists of dozens of cuts spliced together in the editing bay, ostensibly to help overcome combatant deficiencies. Additionally, its many nods to the original Matrix only serve to contrast The Acolyte’s underwhelming offerings with the intense training that each of The Matrix performers went through to look believable and natural.

Perhaps the show’s greatest flaw is its story structure. Scenes consist of what the show incorrectly contends are heated battles or harrowing adventure beats followed by long and unnecessary exposition dumps that take the characters to the next heated battle and consequent dump. Plot twists are ruler-straight, and tension never builds, thanks to poorly handled character development and worse logic.

In fact, the show seems to have no internal logic. Characters perform actions to either clunkily set up later unnecessary scenes or because someone thought they would look cool (they don’t), and The Force is an inconsistent MacGuffin machine used to help the writers out of the many narrative corners they paint themselves into.

However, unarguably, the show’s most illogical addition (the single worst change to canon since Greedo shooting first) is the handling of lightsabers. Responsible gun owners are fully aware that you never point a gun at something that you aren’t prepared to destroy, but not even the most responsible gun owner has The Force to direct their aim. Despite decades of canon to the contrary, these Jedi “never arm their lightsaber unless they are going to kill someone” (except when they inconsistently do just that in multiple scenes). It’s a show mechanic designed for the sole purpose of letting the not-fully-trained villain fight toe-to-toe using three-inch knives against Jedi Masters. A single severed arm would have ended the series in its first poorly handled three minutes.

With rumors swirling that pronouns will soon be Star Wars canon and that this series exists to somehow literally make The Force female, The Acolyte, is on track to do what the Emperor and Darth Vader couldn’t: destroy the Star Wars universe.

WOKE ELEMENTS

White Boys Must Be In A Different Galaxy, Even Further Away

• There must have been a mass migration of whities in the intervening 100 years between The Acolyte and Episode I because there are few in the background and even fewer in the foreground. In fact, between two different Jedi temples on two different worlds, there are only two white male Jedi in either of the first two episodes (that’s a lot of 2’s), and one is on screen for two (another one) or fewer minutes while the other has one line and ***SPOILER*** kills himself rather than reveal a dark secret ***END SPOILER***

All The Single Ladies

• Kathleen didn’t put a chick in it and make it lame. She put all of the chicks in it. If you’re tired of three-foot-tall gal superheroes, you’d better watch something else. The Acolyte has been ratioed.
• On multiple occasions, the girl padawan, who is on her first mission, exhibits more maturity, composure, and wisdom than her full male Jedi Knight counterpart.
• Evil Moptop exhibits all the menace and rage of your average sofa cushion. She’s not a terrible actress, but her Noxima commercial-clear skin, generally soft features (not fat or anything—just soft—as a lady should be ;), and 5′ 3″ stature (the actress’s actual height) do not scream Dark Lord, and nothing in the script helps overcome the deficit.
  • Instead, she’s your run-of-the-mill girl boss with unearned power and a chip on her shoulder.
• Good Moptop is nearly as underwhelming. Nothing about her looks hard or worn or suggests any life struggles.

The Fatside of The Force

• The brave showrunners of Star Wars: The Acolyte have broken through the glass floorboards and given Star Wars fans the world over exactly what they’ve always wanted and needed to feel seen and safe and represented and equal and heard. I give you Obese Wanton Cannoli, Fatawan of the Jedi Order.

Star Wars: The Acolyte (S1: E3 – Destiny)

Sixteen years before the events of Episodes 1 & 2 of The Acolyte, a peaceful community of Force-sensitive communist lesbian refugees who had fled their homeworlds rather than face the unfair persecution of those with power leveled against those without were set upon by representatives of the well-intentioned yet fascist Jedi Order.

As the misguided “deranged monks” of the Order passive-aggressively threaten to steal twin sisters away from their biological mothers, one of the twins will choose murder rather than separation.

Star Wars: The Acolyte (S1: E3 – Destiny) Review

Even though much of Star Wars occurs in space, The Acolyte does not exist in a vacuum. It is a thread in a tapestry of fictional events that have been a part of the global culture for nearly half a century. As such, its storytellers have a responsibility to be consistent with what came before. For as we all know, it only takes one loose thread to unravel the whole thing.

Certainly, there can be changes. After all, who wants to see the same thing over and over again? Yet, no matter how sweeping those changes might be, it stands to reason that good storytellers would appreciate the importance of keeping them consistent within the rules and lore already laid down before.

Then there is Mr. Rian Johnson, the writer and director who shot Star Wars in the heart. A man whose ambition is only outweighed by his incompetence. A man who subverts expectations until the property that you once loved dearly enough to name your children after legacy characters is an unrecognizable bleeding pulp of goo. And, when you thought the franchise couldn’t sink any lower than a nepocidal Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi, Leslye Headland says, “Hold my space beer.”

Episode 3 of The Acolyte introduces Star Wars to some fairly dark concepts that have been explored to great effect in other tales. Few stories stir the blood like those of people wronged by tyrannical governments who rip away loved ones only to indoctrinate them into that which they hate. If it was good enough for The Bible, it certainly has value in the world of entertainment.

However, when storytellers take a giant runny dump on intrinsic elements, like the Jedi are fundamentally good, Yoda, who taught Jedi for nearly a thousand years, had a pretty good grasp on what the Force is, or that Anakin’s conception was unique and special, it’s hard to say that those particular storytellers are one with the Force.

Did you know that the Force isn’t actually the Force? The Jedi have been wrong this whole time. The Force is magic, with spellbooks and magic chants.

Suffice it to say that those very precepts are exactly what Headland has run a lightsaber through, and not an Ahsoka lightsaber that you can heal from in a day, but a double-bladed one that can take out the likes of even a Jedi Master with a certain set of skills. However, her casual disdain for the Jedi and Star Wars canon is eclipsed by her shlocky storytelling, ridiculous dialogue, and laughable lesbian chat-group fantasy fan-fiction.

Unfortunately, the performances in this episode leave much to be desired, as well. The little girls who play the young twins around whom nearly the entire story revolves give wooden performances while delivering dialogue that makes Anakin’s sand soliloquy sound Shakespearian. Furthermore, either due to his discomfort with the language or because he’s working with complete inepts behind the camera, South Korean actor, writer, producer, and fashion model Lee Jung-jae gives an awkward performance with all of the emotional range of a table.

Trying to analyze this level of incompetence is like a blackbelt trying to critique the fighting technique of a child waving around a stick and calling it a sword. Episode 3 of The Acolyte is a heady mixture of cringe and incompetence from the beginning to the end. There are set pieces so unbelievably stupid that they belong in Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman (if you haven’t seen it, do), and like the two episodes before this one, the dialogue is often laugh-out-loud funny when it’s intended to be anything but.

Still, unarguably, the worst thing about this entry is the butchering of Star Wars canon to square-peg Leslye Headland’s worldview into your round hole.

WOKE ELEMENTS

We Ain’t Need No Man

• This episode crams every single Alphabet People and feminist talking point and fantasy into its 30-minute runtime (ex: “the galaxy is not any place that welcomes women like us – ie. powerful, strong, independent women/lesbians)
  • The two lead characters come from a village of communist lesbians who have had to hide themselves to avoid persecution for their alternate lifestyle. They are “witches,” and the show’s clear perspective on the Force is that the Jedi have been wrong for this whole time.
  • Forget Darth Plagues, who developed and taught The Emperor the secrets of using the Force to create life. He was a hack. These broads figured it out long before that so that the two lesbian heads of the lesbian village could lesbian procreate.

Power Dynamics Politics

• The witches are second-class citizens because the Jedi have more power than them, which means that they are inherently wrong and corrupt.
  • The main witch tells her daughters, “This isn’t about good or bad. This is about power and who has the right to use it.” Where have I heard talking points like that before?

The Irony is Strong With This One

• The Jedi are an evil group who steal children under the thin veneer of giving parents a false choice. However, the irony is that as evil as they are portrayed, the mother of the roughly 10-year-old child says that her daughter is old enough to make the life-altering decision to leave home (and never return), severe all ties with family and her past, and essentially become an entirely new person remade in the Jedi mold. Trans-symbolism much?
  • The other mother, who makes the correct assertion that her daughter is a child and therefore too young to make such a decision, is treated like an emotional hothead and literally dismissed.

Racist Much?

• The white lesbians are only in the background.
• The only white man is also the only padawan. The rest of the Jedi are Masters.
• Even though the two mothers of the twins are of completely different species, one a black human (or close enough) and the other a white-skinned horn-covered Zabrak (think Darth Maul), the black mother who “created” the girls using the force made sure that they were black humans.

Star Wars: The Acolyte (S1: E4 – Day)

Now that the convoluted and needlessly complex “adventure” to prove that Osha was on a spaceship lightyears away from the crime she’s accused of committing, a ship filled with eyewitnesses who could prove her whereabouts by answering a simple question, is completed, the real mystery of The Acolyte has begun to unfold… and has almost certainly also been immediately answered.

Star Wars: The Acolyte (S1:E4 – Day) Review

It’s hard to believe that a Star Wars program could be so bad as to leave one wistfully nostalgic for Ahsoka and season 3 of The Mandalorian, but you must give it to Leslye Headland. She has crafted a truly spectacular piece of cinematic crap that makes the Ewok movies look like peak Spielberg.

The dialogue reads like a high schooler who was just gifted copies of The Screenwriter’s Bible and First Draft and threw away the bible. Virtually every scene is used as either an excuse to exposit, rather than as an organic consequence, or to transport characters to the next set piece to deliver the next bit of unnatural dialogue. In fact, the first conversation in Episode 4 is an awkward one that almost immediately follows on the heels of the actual several-minute recap of the season thus far.

In true amateur-hour fashion, the scene is initiated by a round of the Pronoun Game. For those not in the know, the Pronoun Game is a cheat sometimes used by writers to give a character an excuse to exposit information for the reader’s or, in this case, viewers’ benefit. In this instance, the padawan, who had been traveling with the main adventuring group since the first episode, is talking to Osha, who thanks the padawan for her help, to which the padawan replies, “Thanks for what?” This gives Osha an excuse to catch the audience back up to date.

Worse than this, or its claustrophobic and fake-looking sets, is the complete lack of care about what new canon is casually being vomited up in the guise of Jedi Wisdom. In a scene in which Osha disturbs a beast that the Squid Game master consequently kills, the aforementioned padawan tells Osha that it “is always an honor to get to witness anything or anyone transform into the Force.” So, now the Jedi feel honored to watch anything or anyone die, and since the padawan was specifically referencing death by lightsaber, we can assume that honor-feeling is extended out to all those the Jedi must kill. Why, then, do the Jedi have a code of not killing unarmed opponents? The answer is that the writers are morons.

Were it only the writing that was bad. Alas, the performances, which were never strong to begin with, have degraded into embarrassing territory. The Apothecary from the first two episodes flails his hands around with wild and bizarre gesticulations as Leslye Headland’s legally recognized spouse over-enunciates her lines while ostensibly having a board strapped across her shoulders. Still, no one could regurgitate this trash well.

Watch virtually anything else.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Pronouns In Spaaaaaaaaccccce

• A non-human character is introduced just so that someone can refer to it as “they.” Which is still stupid because, regardless of its species, it’s a singular entity.

Death Cult

• The Jedi now believe that watching things and people die is an honor. The left has done an amazing job devaluing life.

Diversity is Our Strength

• If different skin colors and sexual orientations are our strength, I’d hate to see how this crap would have turned out if the cast and crew were homogenous.
  • The algorithm hasn’t changed. Everyone has been carefully selected to make it appear as though the demographic breakdown in a galaxy far far away is perfectly even… except for whites. They must still be in The Outer Rim.

Star Wars: The Acolyte (S1: E5 – Night)

Continuing last week’s “cliffhanger,” episode 5 of The Acolyte concludes the Jedi/Sith showdown and finally reveals the identity of the series’s mysterious antagonist.

Star Wars: The Acolyte (S1: E5 – Night) Review

By virtue of not being a miserable embarrassment to the once-great franchise and benefiting from being little more than a 20-minute battle, Night is hands down the best episode of the series so far. The dialogue continues to be third-rate and meaningless, but since only about ten lines are spoken, it’s not nearly as distracting as in past episodes.

Where it comes closest to shining is in its prolonged lightsaber fight. The choreography is serviceable, though it includes too many seasoned warriors needlessly turning their backs to armed enemies with unnecessary flourishing spins (something that’s been plaguing Star Wars since the prequels). The performers and the stunt folks do a perfectly fine job of energetically engaging one another in battle, and no one walks off a lightsaber skewering.

However, despite this episode clawing its way to the heights of mediocrity, it manages to bungle the “big reveal” of the Sith Master. Truly, it’s not even this episode’s fault, but the fault of every minute that came before. The series has never given audiences a reason to invest emotionally in any of the characters and has certainly not done so with its “big baddie.” The result, even if the previous episode had not gracelessly telegraphed it, is like finding out Darth Vader was actually Maintenence Worker 1, but you never cared in the first place.

Furthermore, the Jedi are virtually useless at this point, with some Jedi Masters dying by Force Push and others not able to sense evil intent a literal foot away.

If adequate fight choreography and lightsabers are all you need to get your motor running, this episode of The Acolyte is for you.

UPDATE: I’m so uninterested in this show that I completely forgot that Mae has a huge white bumpy spiral that takes up most of her forehead. This makes the conclusion of this episode and, by extension, the Jedi even dumber than previously thought. Thanks to AZ of Heels or Babyface on X for pointing this out. I’ve updated the story rating accordingly.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Before you start yelling at me in the comments about the series now being marked wokeish, don’t. This episode’s lack of content averaged the series out.

I Know You Want It

• But it’s not there. Besides the same conspicuously missing white cast members as in the previous episodes, this episode didn’t have time for much wokeness.  You could say that the female padawan seemed a smidge tougher and more capable than some of the more experienced men, but it’s a matter of degrees. The episode is virtually 20 straight minutes of fighting with almost no story or dialogue, so there is little opportunity to shove politics down anyone’s throat. Be angry if you must, but I calls ’em like I sees ’em.

Star Wars: The Acolyte (S1: E6 – Teach/Corrupt)

Now that the Double Mint Twins have pulled the old switcharoo, the classic Disney hijinx can commence. Everyone’s favorite emotional basket case, Jedi Master Sol, is so woodenly distraught after his team and pupil are butchered that he can’t tell a lightsaber from a gundark. Will he pull his head out of his Sarlacc Pit in time to save himself from Mae’s PMS mood swings? Only time will tell.

As for Osha, she finds herself dazed and confused on an unknown alien world. As she goes full Peeping Tom, will she be content fondling Smylo Ren’s big black lightsaber, or will she get sucked into the dark Jedi’s blackhole? Tune in to find out.

Star Wars: The Acolyte (S1:E6 – Teach/Corrupt) Review

Incompetence, thy name is Disney. At first glance, this episode of The Acolyte might not seem like the bumbling mess that it is, mostly because it is not much of anything. Almost nothing happens and even less of consequence. However, one need only apply the lightest pressure to remove the microns-thick layer of scratch-off coating from this cinematic lottery ticket from hell and reveal its flaccid jackpot.

Now that its bloated cast has been culled to a handful of key players, episode 6 gave the show’s remaining performers a chance to stretch their thespian muscles, and I’m pretty sure each pulled a hammy. From Leslye Headland’s wooden green wife and Squid Game Jedi’s botox-filled melting and emotionless face to Amandla Sternberg’s perpetually mildly grumpy take on The Parent Trap, no one seems to have any better idea of what their characters are doing than does the audience.

Their less-than-stellar performances are not entirely their fault. As the prequels taught us, even Academy Award-winning actresses can crap the bed when given mediocre direction on how to espouse garbage dialogue. After all, how does one naturally express a series of words that no human, anywhere fictional or real, would ever say? So it is with this entry of Star Wars: The Acolyte. Headland’s inability to maintain consistent character motivations, let alone ethos or pathos, only compounds things.

Ever since Game of Thrones ran out of source material, an increasing number of programs have begun to feel stretched thin. They often seem to have enough quality content for a few hours, but instead, this material is spread over too many episodes, leading to a noticeable drop in quality.” However, The Acolyte barely has enough for an hour-and-a-half show. So, each episode inorganically piles on new plots, character motivations, and one-dimensional “mysteries” as filler. The result is dramatic tension that fizzles before it can begin and an aimless slow paced nothingness that not even Falcor and Sebastian can fix.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Jedi Clown Cars

• The complete and unwarranted debasing of the Jedi as strong and capable warrior wizards who give completely of themselves in the service of others is being almost gleefully perpetrated on the decades-long heroes of children everywhere. Some of it is being done by sheer incompetence, and some thanks to the twisted perspective of the show’s writers. It’s difficult to tell what the exact ratio is. However, based on every other aspect of the show, it’s my belief that their incompetence far exceeds even their prodigious wokeness, which is why I don’t give every episode a 100% woke rating.
  • That said, this episode was the straw that broke the tauntaun’s back.
    • Master Sol is a weepy mess who couldn’t Force sense his way down an empty hallway.
    • The weakest, most pitiful excuse for a Jedi is the white boy below.
    • The other Jedi Masters are nearly as useless as Sol.
    • The underlying current of power politics is never far from the surface. The Jedi are powerful and, therefore, oppressors, while the oppressed and underrepresented Sith want only to live their alternative lifestyle in peace.

Never Let a Mohel Us a Lightsaber

• When they aren’t mistaking different people, some with imminent murderous intent, for someone else when using their Force senses, the Jedi are busy recruiting Jedi Knight Soy Lo-T B’ay Ta-Mayl (who I honestly thought was a lesbian woman when he first came on screen). He is the wimpiest piece of boneless chicken ever to dawn the Jedi robes. When he’s not nervously stuttering his lines as a glorified secretary, he’s fumbling to extract his lightsaber for long enough to be rescued by the vastly superior female Jedi and the lightsaber she got from Toon Town.
  • Oh, he happens to be white. Surprised?

Star Wars: The Acolyte (S1: E7 – Choice)

In Episode 7, we return to the planet of the communist lesbian space witches to see what happened from the Jedi’s perspective. That is to say that we watch nearly the entire horrible episode again (about 70% of it) from slightly different camera angles. The point, no doubt, is to provide some grand revelation, but it instead answers questions that either no one had or cared to know, revealing what everyone already knew.

In a show in which character motivations change from moment to moment, episode 7 goes full retard with characters changing their minds midbreath. New Force powers are introduced for no reason other than to do so, with no explanation of how they could possibly work or with any concern about the implications of their existence within the greater context of the entire franchise.

This is a show by morons for morons, and I hate it with the burning intensity of a million purple lightsaber whips. The 30% of this episode that is original (that’s being incredibly generous) makes no sense, as Lesbian Headband and crew deconstruct the Jedi with barely enough talent or insight to fit in a Porg’s ass.

The heroes of The Republic, for a thousand years, are portrayed as villains even though their actions are always justifiable. Sol kills strong black lesbian witch-mom as she explodes into a Death Eater’s fart in the middle of a tense and precarious situation and appears to be disintegrating her daughter in front of the Jedi only to announce that she is going to allow Osha to join the Jedi as she slowly slides off of Sol’s blade and dies. Never mind the stupidity of her actions; the entire situation could have been avoided by saying that before anything happened.

I don’t even care. Screw this. The show sucks. It’s too dumb even to dissect. It’s a horribly written piece of crap that isn’t worth the electricity it takes to watch it. The entire episode can be summarized with one scene: This squad of Jedi has been on a survey mission for nearly two months but never bothered to tell the white guy what the hell they are looking for. Furthermore, they are looking for a “vergence in the Force” by taking soil and water samples (you know, like droids could do) instead of searching with the #*@&!ng Force…which is how they find the vergence anyway.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Out With The Same Old Same Old

• The Jedi are evil because of systemic bigotry and power politics… yadda yadda yadda
• The white male Jedi is a weepy b!(@h because he is.
• Communist Lesbian Witches: The Encore
• The only white guy is a weepy b!(@h

Star Wars: The Acolyte (S1: E8 – The Acolyte)

A series of contrivances bring the main cast together for a final showdown on the now uninhabited planet of the communist lesbian witches.

Star Wars: The Acolyte (S1: E8 – The Acolyte) Review

The entire series was about learning how to Force Choke, something for which Jedi Masters apparently have no defense. Do I need to say anything else?

WOKE ELEMENTS

Woe Unto Them That Call Evil Good, and Good Evil

• The entire series, other than being about learning to Force Choke, exists only to deconstruct the Jedi and turn them into morally ambiguous liars and murderers and the Sith into a sympathetic, misunderstood group who only wants to live their alternative lifestyle in peace.
• Actual murderers are misunderstood good guys, while those who accidentally kill in what is clearly a mistaken attempt at self-defense are murderers.

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Back to Black

“Back to Black” is a 2024 biographical drama film based on the life of British singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse, portrayed by Marisa Abela. It delves into Winehouse’s rise to fame, tumultuous relationships, and the making of her Grammy-winning album, “Back to Black.”

Back to Black Review

In a film glorifying a manic alcoholic, “artiste” spiraling out of control only to crash land into an early grave, Back to Black benefits from capable, surprisingly self-restrained hands behind the camera. Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson (50 Shades of Grey) and shot by cinematographer Polly Morgan (The Woman King), Back to Black never manages to engender non-fans to its subject or build any emotional bonds to the narrative.

Furthermore, the film’s earnest performances never quite transcend to captivating. This is almost entirely due to the light in which Winehouse is portrayed as emotionally immature and seemingly unpleasant. Further hindering the actors is the prioritization of intervals that ostensibly took place between more traditionally interesting dramatic moments, robbing the performers of their chance to stretch and shine and stealing any opportunity for the audience to connect.

One notable example is that of a drug-induced fight between Whinehouse and her husband. In lieu of what must have been an emotionally charged confrontation and the almost certainly empathetically identifiable details leading up to it, the film depicts the conclusion of them chasing one another down several very public streets and its quick resolutive embrace.

Perhaps this resolution would feel meaningful if we were ever given a reason to bond with the characters outside of Amy’s talent. Unfortunately, even her adoration for her grandmother (one of the only interpersonal relationships even mildly explored in the film) is portrayed as shallowly based on her “style” and early sexual exploits. The same can be said for the alcoholism for which Winehouse is as well known as for that of her music. While she is regularly shown drowning her feelings in a bottle, the root cause of her addiction isn’t much explored beyond the sentiment, “That’s just Amy.”

Without a doubt, Winehouse was a beautiful vocalist and a talented composer. However, the over-celebrated perceived “edginess” of her beehive hairdo, ample tattoos, and tendency to intersperse crass lyrics and curse words into traditional-sounding soulful jazz, along with her unfortunate and virtually unexplored substance abuse, isn’t enough to carry a nearly two-hour narrative.

WOKE ELEMENTS

NOTE: I would have rated the Woke-O-Meter lower save for the fact that the film strongly portrayed the importance of a loving father in Winehouse’s life. Despite some of her lyrics, the film also clearly showed that she yearned for a more traditional life as a wife and mother. Subsequently, it boosted the percentage.

Dash of Man-Hate

• Some of the lyrics to songs sung early in the film glorify the degradation of men.

This One is Tough

• The big one—the one that cost the movie most of the 50 points that I removed but could arguably be ignored or cause to mark the movie as completely Woke—is that of its message. Winehouse is portrayed as a manic and substance abuser who repeatedly physically abused her husband and ultimately killed herself with alcohol. She’s also (especially in the first half of the film) portrayed as an unlikable and sarcastic brat who is overly dramatic, rude, and thoughtless. However, it’s very difficult to tell whether the film’s tone is one of celebrating these qualities as the mark of a “strong, independent woman” who carved out her own path or if it intends to show how these personality traits led to her early demise.
  • Ultimately, I heavily penalized it due to the film’s last line, a narrated reading from a letter Winehouse wrote as a young(er) girl. It read something to the effect that she just had to be herself. This would suggest a celebration even though “being herself” meant dying of alcohol poisoning before the age of 30.

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Monkey Man

A young fighter named Kid plans and exacts his revenge for a lifetime of tyranny and loss.

Review

Monkey Man is a slapdashed action/revenge film with an underdeveloped everything except an overdeveloped sense of its own importance.  With a messy narrative scotch taped together with thousands of nausea-inducing fast cuts and a bloated cast of nameless characters that make cardboard cutouts look deep, not even the writer/director/star of the film’s 1000% commitment and impressive physical prowess is enough to make this monstrosity passably entertaining.

If you thought that The Beekeeper was a poor man’s John Wick, Monkey Man is a cheap Indian knockoff to rival Bollywood Superman. From the black-on-black suit to the unstoppable badassery as Dev Patel’s Kid slices his way through one nameless thug after the other, there’s neither an original thought nor even a good one evident at any moment in this husk of a waste of time.

Sidenote: Those of you who have read other reviews on this site know I normally write significantly longer ones than this. However, this movie is 2 hours of noise and strobe lights that I will never get back and have no desire to spend any more time thinking about.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Because he said so

• There need be no ambiguity. The writer, director, and leading actor Dev Patel has expressly said that this film is about activism.
  • It is a movie solely about power dynamics and victimization.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Trannies

• Kid is rescued by a temple full of dudes who think that they are women. Their wisdom and kindness drives half of the film.
  • Later, they save him again, but this time, they are ninjas in Asian drag queen armor.

Faith: We Should Be Fighting For Each Other… But Not Christians

• In the video above, Dev Patel says that his movie is supposed to be about the beauty and importance of “faith” and that we should come together as one under it.
  • In the film’s first scene, after its prologue, a ring announcer who is working the crowd randomly tells them that they consist of people of various religions, which he lists off to cheers. Of course, when he gets to Christianity, the crowd aggressively boos and hisses.
  • Sidenote: this is such a meaningless bit of Leftist BS. Faith unto itself is meaningless. My youngest children have faith that a fairy sneaks into their rooms at night to trade money for teeth. There are all kinds of false idols and crazy ideas in which people place their faith. Faith is only good if that in which you have put it is both good and true.

The post Monkey Man first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

The First Omen

Since childhood, Margaret has been a ward of the Church. When the American Cardinal with whom she grew up has her transferred to Italy to be confirmed as a nun, she feels blessed. However, it doesn’t take Margaret long to begin to realize that something is very wrong with the faithful surrounding her.

The First Omen is a wonderfully shot piece of horror cinema. It lovingly channels the cinematography and pacing of its 1976 progenitor and mostly eschews today’s trend of thousands of fast cuts in every scene. These long continuous shots held on performers masterfully dripping with silent subtext allow for the slow-building tension that fans of the genre used to enjoy before horror became a race to see who could get the most graphic and disgusting gore past the MPAA.

Aided by a perfectly haunting score and equally spine-tingling performances, The First Omen has all of the talent on both sides of the camera needed to cement itself as a worthy heir of the franchise, one that could usher in an entirely new era of horror that thrills rather than repulses. Unfortunately, it somewhat fumbles this with a handful of counter-intuitive gross-out moments that arrest the tension that had been building. Even more disappointing is The First Omen’s underwhelming conclusion. Prioritizing the franchise’s continuation over solid storytelling or continuity, it wraps things up with a quick and easy cheesy bow that might as well read “To Be Continued.”

However, where the movie truly fails is in its needless and blasphemous retconning of Damien’s origin (i.e. the entire film). It unnecessarily dumbs down the Church’s leaders in order to propagate a narrative full of Kola Superdeep Borehole-sized logical (let alone doctrinal) inconsistencies… because.

WOKE ELEMENTS

The Old Girl Network

• The First Omen is a heavily female-centric film, with the handful of men in it being relegated to tertiary supporting roles. However, this does not a woke movie make. While almost certainly, the behind-the-scenes discussions leading up to its creation were peppered with progressive clichés like, “It’s about time,” the film is crafted in such a way that the female-laden cast makes complete sense. Furthermore, the male characters aren’t sacrificed at the altar of beta cucks to make the lady folk look better.

Thirty Pieces of Silver

• The movie’s greatest sin, earning most of its BASED score of 0%, is only its entire premise. There is no way to explain it without spoilers, so be forewarned.
  • ***SPOILERS*** The film has retconned Damien’s origin so that he is no longer born from a jackal and protected by Satanists. Now, a misguided cult (that “goes all the way to the top”) within the Catholic Church brings about the AntiChrist.  They so fear the “freedom” and “loss of power” born from the growing secular movement that they believe the only way to once again “gain the trust” of those whom they’ve lost is to breed young women with demons and the resulting female offspring with their own demon father. They contend that the fear, death, and depravity fomented by the AntiChrist’s reign will be such that it will drive people back to the Church. ***END SPOILER***

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Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

Two years after the events of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the Spenglers and Paul Rudd’s Gary are bustin’ ghosts full-time in New York City.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is a narrative disaster. It forgets character and plot setups in the same scene that it introduces them, and its only likable characters are the remaining original cast, whose otherwise pointless roles exist solely to put Gen-X butts in seats.

The original Ghostbusters was a comedic masterpiece of creativity that was full of colorful, well-defined characters, fun set pieces, and clever dialogue, all brought together with a simple but well-thought-out and structured story. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire takes a hammer to a nuclear accelerator (no, really—this happens in the movie), substitutes witt for vermouthless irony, nipple-play, and sex dungeons (again—this is really in the movie), and sacrifices character and plot development to the pantheon of soulless sequel gods.

Gone is Afterlife’s pint-sized, lovably quirky nerd with a big heart and bigger brain. In Frozen Empire, McKenna Grace’s Phoebe Spengler has been transformed into a disrespectful and insufferably arrogant ass with a chip on her shoulder the size of her manufactured loaner and superiority complexes.

In the previous installment, Finn Wolfhard’s Trevor felt like a tacked-on and unneeded accessory whose only purpose was to draw in Stranger Things fans. Now that audiences no longer care about what happens in The Upside Down, what little screen time Trevor gets is completely irrelevant and only serves to paint him as little more than a defacto high-functioning, mentally challenged nuisance… for comedy.

Like Wolfard, Carrie Coon’s painfully underdeveloped Callie Spengler receives little more than perfunctory screen time. Still, at least the time she does get serves to move the contrived Molly McButter-like B-plot along.

Paul Rudd‘s Gary is the straw that broke the lovable beta cucks back. He’s gotten nearly 20 years out of it, and it’s time to retire. We get it; you’re charmingly quirky yet also dry. Actually, his character arc of wanting to figure out his place in this new family dynamic is one of the few things in the film that had the potential to be interesting.

Unfortunately, Gary wasn’t the only thing sacrificed in the film. In order to give time to a new bloated cast of purposeless black holes of charisma, caustic pricks, and shoehorned in forgettable characters from Afterlife, plot cohesion was fed to Zuul and crapped out as Carpathian mood slime.

Because everything must now be a cinematic universe, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire spends three-quarters of its runtime inexpertly world-building with the grace and subtlety of a 100-foot-tall marshmallow man stomping through the streets of Manhattan.

What little plot there is doesn’t start gaining any narrative traction until an hour and fifteen minutes into the movie. Until then, like a San Franciscan bum dipped in whiskey-soaked molasses, it drunkenly and slowly meanders from one half-finished and synthetic character arc to another, looking for a fix that never satisfies. When the story finally does get going, it’s over before it starts, and its lifeless king-of-the-generic villains is defeated with an unsatisfying combination of convenience and contrivance (if you see the Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, just remember that the melting point of brass is about 1000º higher than an average home gas range can reach).

Yet all of these faults could have been forgiven if a single joke would have been worth more than a half-hearted smile. Instead, each lazily conceived gag lands with a thud, only serving to remind you of how far the franchise has fallen.

WOKE ELEMENTS

The More Than Friendly Ghost

• Although it is never expressly stated, it is strongly implied via the music, cinematography, staging, costumes, dialogue, and some suggestive and longing looks that 14-year-old Phoebe Spengler is romantically interested in a teenage girl ghost.
  • Because it’s left up to interpretation, and this is modern Hollywood, I assumed that I was right and scored it accordingly.
    • Once you’ve seen it for yourself, please leave some comments. I’d love to see what you thought.

Cuckmen, Party of Rudd

• Paul Rudd’s Gary, while a nice and loving man, is completely without balls, and not because he struggles as a disciplinarian. He desperately wants to have a well-defined position in the family (i.e., he wants to be a dad and husband) but can’t quite figure out how to get there. If only there were a way. It’s too bad that no one has ever figured out the steps to becoming a husband and father. Maybe one day.
  • The concept of marriage never pops up (you know, the perfect solution to his dilemma), and the one time that Rudd and Coon’s character’s relationship is brought up, the “uncomfortable” nature of relationship labels is played off as one of the movie’s many unfunny jokes.
  • In the end, Gary (without even getting married) takes his girlfriend’s last name.

Men Need Not Apply

• Except for the legacy characters, all men in the film are either d!@<s, bumbling idiots, or Paul Rudd’s character.

Why Have A Personality, When You Can Be A Girlboss d1@<?

• McKenna Grace’s Phoebe is no longer the lovable and socially awkward nerd from Afterlife. Now she’s a full-on nigh-infallible McGuffin-Machine and girl boss with an attitude in lieu of a personality.

Anti-Colonialism

• Patton Oswalt’s useless time-filler of a character force-feeds the audience some non-sequitur BS about the evils of colonialism.

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