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Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver

Picking up immediately after the events of Part One, Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver begins as Kora and her ragtag band of hand-to-hand combatants prepare the farm-tool-wielding agrarian Viking Space Amish for war against spaceships and automatic laser rifles. However, Fortune’s favor is left to question as they quickly learn that the resurrected Atticus Noble and his armada will arrive in just five days’ time.

Will Kora and her group of forgettable strangers be able to come together as a team and lead her newest adoptive family and Discount Bradley Cooper to victory against the vastly superior forces of the evil Space Soviets before they steal their cereal? What do you think?

Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver Review

If you thought that Rebel Moon – Part One’s video-game cut-screen-team-builder-Kings-Landing-Bowl-of-Brown-of-sci-fi-and-fantasy-grab-bag-slow-mo-done-better-by-everyone-else-less-fun-than-a-burnt-taint-of-a-what-the-hell-did-I-just-watch was something special, get ready to shave your wookie and French kiss Rian Johnson because holy crap The Scargiver gives new meaning to meaninglessness.

Rebel Moon – Part One was just unwatchably bad, but The Scargiver has traversed the waters of that Rubicon and reached the shores of So Bad It’s Good. Without a single redeemable quality, from its overbearing and melodramatic score to the absolutely mortifying stupidity of its premise and everything in between, Rebel Moon – Part Two should make everyone involved reexamine their lives.

Cinema Sins, The Critical Drinker, Pitch Meeting, and Honest Trailers may actually melt down trying to limit their jibes and observations to fit their normal runtimes. Every scintilla of dialogue would embarrass a middle-aged virgin Dungeons & Dragons fan-fiction writer, and each performance is a masterclass in over-acting. Even the one thing that Zack Snyder can be counted on to deliver cool, slow-motion shots is a disaster. The Scargiver represents the worst use of slow motion since Georges Méliès first invented it for his 1902 “A Trip to the Moon”

What’s more, the film is a continuous stream of logical inconsistencies and a rushed hybrid of brutishly exposited backstories and character arcs that read like a glitching AI-authored wiki visually slapped together by drunken blind monks who’ve only read of movies. Why can’t the Space Soviets find grain literally anywhere else? How is it possible that a small village of sickle-waving farmers could ever produce enough grain to feed an entire planet? Why do the farmers use hand sickles and hover-carts? If they don’t have a problem using hover carts and spaceships, why, in the name of transvestite alien parasite hookers (that’s a thing in the first one), don’t they use tractors and other mechanized farm equipment? The list could go on for pages!

But I say screw it. Rebel Moon – Part Two is laugh-out-loud bad and Worth it, but only if you are with friends, have in your possession copious amounts of alcohol, and take full advantage of the following drinking game:

Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver Drinking Game

Take a drink:

• When grain is referenced or said.
• Every time someone survives something unsurvivable.
• When you forget a character’s name.
• Every time grain is shown in slow motion (DO NOT DRINK EVERY TIME THAT SLOW MOTION IS USED. YOU’LL GO BLIND).

Take two drinks:

• When someone you don’t care about dies (not an extra – they have to have spoken at least a line).
• Every battle cry (celebratory or otherwise).

Take a shot:

• When the farmers spend time doing something that they absolutely don’t have time for as they prepare for certain annihilation (e.g., going to bed, having a party, or sewing banners).
• When the farmers accomplish something in a day, that would take days or months to accomplish.
• When someone gives an inspirational speech.

Bonus Rounds (optional):

• Take a shot every time RoboAnthony Hopkins shows up on screen for no reason.
• Take a shot for every deux ex machina (i.e., every time something conveniently and nearly miraculously saves the day).
• Take a drink every time that you say to yourself, “How did this get made, or how did this cost $166 million.”

WOKE ELEMENTS

They Had Extra Bowls

• Both Kora and secondhand Furiosa adopt or already have androgynous Women’s March haircuts.
  • I concede that that’s a super nitpick, but there weren’t really many other instances.

When Is A Girl Boss Not

• Technically, Kora and Cosplay Furiosa are girl bosses, but even that is handled with incompetence.
  • Both get pretty wrecked but both spindly armed waifs also deal out 80s roided-out action hero amounts of damage.

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Road House (2024)

Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a retired UFC fighter who now lives a nomadic life, wandering from one underground fight to another while scratching a living off of his sordid reputation. When he’s hired to provide security at a Florida Keys Road House, he has no idea that he’ll have to do more than break up bar fights if he hopes to survive the month.

Road House (2024) firmly belongs as a VOD rather than a theatrical release. Its uneven pacing and underdeveloped characters combined with its cartoon plot aren’t worth the price of admission. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s all bad or not worth the watch.

Jake Gyllenhaal absolutely brings it. His Dalton is cool under pressure, slow to anger, and utterly convincing as a nigh unstoppable bad@$$. Gyllenhaal’s Dalton doesn’t read Legend of The Falls. He certainly doesn’t have a degree from NYU’s philosophy department, and Tai Chi and fruity spinning back kicks have been replaced with rage-filled haymakers and a WWE/UFC hybrid that looks friggin’ great on screen, especially when combined with Gyllenhaal’s commitment and Conor McGregor’s expertise.

For the most part, Road House (2024)’s camera work is fairly utilitarian, but like every other part of the film, it goes next level in the fight scenes. Road House (2024) boasts some of the best fight cinematography in the last ten years and certainly this year’s top three best fight choreography.

With the exception of Gyllenhaal and McGregor, virtually every other character is forgettable and generic. However, McGregor might have himself a new career as this generation’s Vin Jones. He’s not a terrific actor by any means, but he can obviously sell the fights, and he’s good enough and intimidating enough to be the mostly silent baddie in a Guy Ritchie flick.

The film’s pacing isn’t always consistent, with too much screen time given to unimportant events and far too little given to establishing the bad guys and giving the audience a reason to care or someone to root against. This renders the finale a little underwhelming.

That said, this Road House’s weakest point is its lack of identity. The 1989 Road House was a raunchy campfest. However, 2024’s is far more sanitized. No patrons are offering anything special for $20 or being used as a “regular Saturday night thing,” and zero throats get ripped out. By straddling the line between the original’s camp and today’s cinematic sensibilities, it sacrifices distinctiveness and relegates itself to a fun but forgettable watch.

If there’s one takeaway from Road House (2024), it’s that Jake Gyllenhaal needs to do more action flicks right now before he ages out.

WOKE ELEMENTS

DEI

• You can almost feel the studio calculus in the film. “What is the correct percentage of diversity that will offend the least number of people? What characters can be ‘diverse’?”
  • The film is set in the fictional town of Glass Key, FL. However, the real Florida Keys has a black population of 3.3%. It’s rather coincidental that the only two business owners (one of which is the gal who owns the Road House) we are introduced to happen to be black. So, it’s there but it’s not made into a big deal, and even I have to admit that this is a real nitpick.
  • While the henchmen are “diverse,” the two main baddies are blond-haired white guys. Of course, the main good guy is a white guy, so I guess the studio’s calculus figured that balanced things out.

Free At Last, Free At Last

• The film only has a single eye-rolling moment of wokeness artificially shoehorned in.
  • Out of the blue and never mentioned again, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1960s Civil Rights Movement are briefly and inexpertly fumbled into a completely unneeded, unwarranted, and unwanted bit o’ dialogue.

Ain’t No Eves Around These Parts

• The few female characters have little to do in this Road House, but those with speaking roles are all flawless, even the bartender.
  • I can’t emphasize how little they have to do with the film or how little screen time they get. I promise that you wouldn’t have even noticed ten years ago.

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