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True Detective: Night Country (S4:E1)

When eight scientists vanish without a trace, former partners Liz Danvers and Evangeline Navarro will begin to uncover a mystery that may run deeper than anyone could have believed.

Episode 1 of True Detective: Night Country has all of the elements that could lead to an excellent season of TV: murder, intrigue, interpersonal drama; and instead of ego-driven verbosity crafted to remind the viewer of the writer’s intelligence, the dialogue is solid and natural.

Unfortunately, as episode 1 tries to set the stage for the rest of the season, its writers unnecessarily fill it with too much. Every character has an almost overwhelming amount of personal drama to which the audience is subjected. It’s more than establishing characters; it’s on the edge of suffocation and feels like filler. The mysterious events of the primary plot are more than enough to maintain the intended levels of tension and interest.

Further complicating things, Jodie Foster and Kali Reis’s detectives, Danvers and Navarro, feel artificially forced together. Both are written as clichéd male cop characters that confuse atypical gender roles for originality.

Making up for much of what’s wrong are the performances. Everyone in True Detective: Night Country is very natural and invested. However, unsurprisingly, Jodi Foster’s performance outshines the others., it’s especially noticeable when she interacts with Reis, whose character is perpetually pissy and unlikable.

Filmed on location in both Norway and Alaska, the atmosphere is the show’s greatest asset. In a show like this, it would be easy to go overboard on the cinematics, but Director Issa López refrains and keeps things nice and tight. She’s at her best when taking full advantage of the oppressively dark and snowy tundra while focusing on the show’s more thrilling aspects.  It’s unfortunate that the script that she co-wrote doesn’t allow her to open up her stride and run.

Episode 1 of True Detective: Night Country is a mostly well-done piece with some inherent flaws that may or may not be overcome as the series progresses.

WOKE ELEMENTS

About every five minutes (not an exaggeration), there’s a little something tossed in that only lasts for a second, but it’s like having individual BBs thrown at your face every few minutes at dinner. They don’t hurt or affect the flavor and quality of the food, but they get really annoying really fast and ruin the experience of the meal.

Womankind

• The leads’ roles are hard-as-nails cops who are written like men. Maybe it could have worked for one of them. After all, Jodie Foster is one of the greatest actors alive today. She could make a reading of Ikea directions seem compelling. However, neither Reis nor her character are quite up to the task, and it all comes off as a self-insert.
  • It’s exacerbated by the fact that Foster’s character’s subordinate, of course, is a vastly inferior man in all respects, if for no other reason than for Foster to dunk on him.
• In one of the opening scenes, the one-lady cop is able to dominate a much larger and very fit man. He’s drunk, but he’s also a belligerent a-hole with no respect for women or authority who is at least a head taller, ten years younger, and outweighs her by 40-50lbs.
  • Yes, I know that Reis is a professional boxer, and she probably could have dealt with the guy. However, at one point, she easily restrains him with one hand for a sustained period.
    • Anybody else see that video of three or four lady cops trying to subdue a single skinny drunk guy? Spoiler: he escapes until a large male bouncer gets involved.
• The lady cop does a reverse booty call.
  • She shows up at the guy’s door.
  • She’s in the dominant position.
  • He stays naked in bed as she cleans herself up and prepares to leave
  • He asks her to stay, and she stoically doesn’t respond, just smirks.
  • He softly says to her, “The next time that you call, I won’t pick up.”
  • Another smirk, and she leaves.

Birdshot

• Foster’s adoptive daughter (exact age unknown: 16 to 20) is introduced after having been caught making a lesbian sex tape. Her sexuality has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the episode.
• There’s a smattering of “Police work harder to solve ‘white’ crimes than they do ‘indigenous’ ones” being thrown around.
• So far, the jerk criminals have been white, while the riotous “activists and protestors” mentioned have been Eskimos. Their lawbreaking is understandable… maybe even noble.

True Detective: Night Country (S4:E2)

Episode 2 of True Detective: Night Country picks up immediately following the conclusion of the previous installment. A mass grave of frozen scientists has been located, creating more questions than answers.

Unlike season one, which starred Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as partners and unlikely friends, Night Country is full of loathsome and unlikeable characters solving a vague crime that it’s hard to care about. The magic sauce in the first season was the chemistry shared between its incredibly charismatic leads. Despite their character’s deep flaws, audiences found themselves emotionally invested in their success and failures.

So far, in the latest season of the uneven series, the lead characters are as cold and miserable as the frozen tundra in which the series is set. Despite her prodigious talent, Jodie Foster isn’t known for playing warm and identifiable characters, and unfortunately, her costar, Kali Reis, is equally distant and plays a character whose emotions are as hard as a frozen core sample.

Equally disappointing is that the mystery doesn’t seem too mysterious. It wants to be, but the writers have left enough breadcrumbs to make a loaf. An interesting twist or two may be introduced between now and its remaining four episodes. However, with episode 2’s glacial pacing, it’s hard to recommend that anyone stick it out long enough to find out.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Girl Power

• In addition to the two emotionally stoic female leads, 90% of the side characters are coincidentally women, at least the competent ones.

Men Are Only Good For One Thing

• No character, male or female, is a person worthy of praise. However, the show must emasculate men whenever possible.
  • The same emasculated man from episode one who was booty-called is shown being in touch with his feelings and soaking in a bubble bath alone with a series of lit candles.

North Lesbos

• They make sure to awkwardly and needlessly remind us that the 17-year-old character is a lesbian.
  • They also show pictures of a very young-looking girl who is the lesbian’s lesbian girlfriend in a bra.
    • It doesn’t matter that the actresses are “old enough” the show is sexualizing teenagers.

They’ve Poisoned The Waterhole

• There’s a burgeoning subplot about an evil mine callously poisoning the local water.

True Detective: Night Country (S4:E3)

The third episode of Night Country is a slight improvement over the last one, with slightly better pacing and a more focused story. However, it still suffers from too much character baggage and a need to kick men in the balls whenever possible.

WOKE ELEMENTS

I Don’t Know But I’ve Been Told, Eskimo…

• They have yet to naturally squeeze in various character’s lesbianism, but that hasn’t stopped them from trying.
  • Now, apparently, Reis’s character is bi-sexual.

Nanook Ain’t Got Nothin’ On Me

• The indigenous people are deeply spiritual and special, while “whitey” is not so much.
• “Not for white boys” is an unironically uttered line.

You Load 16 Tons, And Whaddaya Get

• White run/owned min is evil and has no problem poisoning the water supply, and only the Eskimos seem to be affected by it or care.

The post True Detective: Night Country (season 4) first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

In a 2017 session, Congress concluded that a successful EMP attack by North Korea could result in the loss of up to 90% of the American population.

Leave The World Behind

When the Sanford family booked a weekend getaway at a luxurious Airbnb in the New York countryside, they had no idea that the country would soon find itself amid an unprecedented attack that would shut down… everything.

Executive produced by Barrack and Michelle Obama, Leave The World Behind is a post-apocalyptic thriller that nearly succeeds. The premise is terrifying, especially for those who are up on its real-world plausibility and how quickly the world would likely spiral out of control. Clearly taking notes from the former president’s first-hand knowledge, the filmmakers thoughtfully craft several chilling moments that should have you seriously reconsidering your Tesla while you stock up on heirloom seeds and survival books.

Thanks largely to some excellent cinematography that exquisitely captures and enhances the film’s sense of disorientation and general wrongness, Leave The World Behind is a slow-burning film that manages to build tension throughout, even though very little happens. It’s a testament to the filmmakers that with such a thin script and peopled with thoroughly unlikable characters, the film only really collapses upon its conclusion.

Easily the film’s biggest star, Julia Roberts gives a mostly flat performance that is seriously hindered by some horrifically amateur and clunky dialogue, not to mention a cartoonish character arc that feels like an elitist who has only ever heard of racism from Al Sharpton.

While the marketing makes it look as though Kevin Bacon plays a large role in the film, he only gets about five minutes of screentime, which is a real shame because, not only does he nail the role, but it’s a far more interesting character than anyone else in the film.

The rest of the main cast is rounded out by Mahershala Ali and Ethan Hawke, both of whom give fairly strong performances compared to the material they have with which to work. Ali plays the wealthy owner of the Airbnb with his usual smooth jazz delivery, and Hawke absolutely embodies the modern useless man who is incapable of doing much more than ordering DoorDash and waiting for his perpetually unhappy wife to bark orders at him.

In what seems to be modern Hollywood’s modus operandi, Leave The World Behind suffers from character behavior as inconsistent as the screenwriters need it to be to help them out of the corners they painted themselves into. A paranoid and racist Julia Roberts, who was in a panic at inviting (black) strangers into their rented house in one scene, demands just a few hours later that her husband leave both her children and her alone with those same strangers so that he can go to town for information.

The film is further hampered by poor character development that is mainly limited by a lack of opportunity given to otherwise experienced and talented performers and its childish and discordant portrayal of racism.

Ultimately, the film never decides if it’s a disaster film or one about personal growth and, therefore, comes up short on both. It’s a movie that shows many signs of being good, maybe even excellent, but its deux machina conclusion floats a turd in the cinematic soup that cannot be ignored. After all, what good is a thriller with a mundane ending?

Leave The World Behind Is Worth it

“James,” you ask. “How can it be that a movie you’ve rated so lowly can also be Worth it? The answer is that, if you ignore the finale, Leave The World Behind is an excellent cautionary tale about not being a useless man. Its premise is not only imminently viable, giving excellent real-world scenarios to be studied, but has also been thoroughly and regularly war-gamed in the Pentagon. Obama executive-produced the film and consulted based on his significant first-hand experience on the topic.

WOKE ELEMENTS

This will likely be another one of those films with which some disagree with me about the percentage of wokeness that we gave it. However, the individual instances only constitute a handful of eye-rolling moments. It isn’t the thrust of the film, and while it does take away from the specific scenes in which it happens, it doesn’t diminish the entire film.

Rrrrrrrrrrasicm

• One of the film’s most significant weaknesses is its unrealistic portrayal of racism as well as its actual racism.
  • Julia Roberts, an advertising executive who lives and works in New York City, acts as though she’s never considered the possibility of a wealthy black person.
    • What’s worse is that this trait quickly becomes her character’s primary arc.
      • She apologizes to Ali’s character for her racism, and then, a few scenes later, he’s shown to be even more racist – but it’s treated as wisdom.
      • When Roberts apologizes for being “the way that she is” to the even more racist-but-it’s-ok-because-she’s-black daughter, the film treats the moment as though she’s reached the 3rd level of the Buddha.
      • The story didn’t need this unbelievable subplot. Without it, there was more than enough and far more believable cause for character conflict.
  • The black daughter is an actual racist, but the film treats her bigotry as wisdom.
    • She says, “I’m asking you to remember that if the world falls apart, trust should not be doled out easily to anyone, especially white people.”
      • I dinged the movie super hard for this BS actual racism. Without it, I would have marked it closer to 75%-80% Based.

The post Leave The World Behind first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

Five Nights At Freddy’s

A troubled Mike finds work as a nighttime security guard at the now-defunct and dilapidated family fun center, Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. It doesn’t take long for Mike to discover that something is very wrong at Freddy’s, but can he survive long enough to find out what that is?

Starring Hunger Games alumnus Josh Hutcherson, Five Nights At Freddy’s is moderately to well-paced with serviceable performances and sufficient scares. Hutcherson, who has struggled to find a place in Hollywood after his turn as Peeta in The Hunger Games, plays Mike Schmidt, a down-on-his-luck 30-something who is raising his much younger sister alone. This relationship, as well as Mike’s tragic past, which the movie wastes no time introducing, carries the film more than anything else.

From the first scene, Mike is made a sympathetic character for whom it is impossible not to root, and that empathic web is only drawn tighter as the first act continues. This not only firmly places the audience on Team Peeta but also raises the stakes and the audience’s sensitivity to the well-done but otherwise mundane cinematic horrors about to be visited upon Mike, et al.

Five Nights At Freddy’s isn’t breaking much new ground as horror films go. Like many that have come before, much of its momentum relies on inconsistent character behaviors and people making decisions that real people wouldn’t. Even casual fans of the genre will be able to anticipate the telegraphed scares and general story beats.

Far from perfect, it also suffers a bit in the second act from a subplot that is practically forgotten about before it begins and adds nothing but runtime to the core story. Furthermore, the film’s performances are all just north of adequate. Hutcherson, who gets the most screen time, seems capable of internalizing only two or three emotions. However, despite his limited range and unlike your blocks of wood like Halle Bailey in The Little Mermaid remake, Hutcherson mostly makes it work, largely thanks to the conducive material that demands only as much as he has to give.

Elizabeth Lail, best known for her 10-episode stint as Princess Anna in Once Upon A Time, arguably gives the movie’s best and most nuanced performance as the enigmatic police officer Vanessa. Unfortunately, the quality of her performance is in spite of the material instead of being bolstered by it.

Yet, as predictable and average as it is, Five Nights At Freddy’s also manages to be entertaining. It provides sufficient scares for those who like that sort of thing; the story is engaging enough for the audience to care, and the novelty is sufficiently fun. With a magic mix of mundane and just enough with a dash of something extra, we recommend Five Night At Freddy’s as Worth it, but with the caveat that it is worth streaming on Peacock rather than spending money on a night out.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Hutcherson’s Mike is relegated to a supporting role in the finale so that two female characters can handle the main antagonist. This hurts the film’s momentum, keeping it from building to a full crescendo. Thus, we knocked a few points off for wokeness.

The post Five Nights At Freddy’s first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

Carnival Row (season 1)

While not perfect, season 1 of Carnival Row was a mostly interesting introduction to a unique and bleak fantasy world. Set in a fictional land, one part steampunk-lite, one part Dungeons & Dragons, and two parts 1850s London, Carnival Row immediately sets itself apart in form, if not function.

Following Police Inspector Rycroft Philostrate, played by Orlando Bloom, and his on-again-off-again love interest, the pixie Vignette Stonemoss, as they fall in love in the ancestral land of the Fae during the war between the evil and overwhelming forces of The Pact, a far off country bent on world domination and the complete destruction or subjugation of their enemies, and The Burgue, a marginally less evil human country whose alliance with the Fae is a thinly veiled attempt to transform the magical folk into a workforce of indentured second-class citizens while The Burgue strips their land of all of its wealth and resources.

Not long after they meet, the two star-crossed lovers are violently separated, only to be reunited several years later in the land of The Burgue.

Full of political intrigue, wonderfully conceived costumes and sets, not to mention a surprisingly compelling performance by Orlando Bloom, season one of Carnival Row had all the makings of a long-running modern fantasy classic. Bloom’s tortured yet charismatic Inspector is duality personified. Caught between worlds, he’s half Sherlock Holmes and half Reggie Kray, able to sniff out crimes and deliver a beating with equal finesse and voracity, and Bloom delivers in every scene with as much swagger as he does vulnerability.

Cara Delevingne, whose IMDB page is rife with, let’s say, “interesting” roles, surprises with a performance that is both believable and manages to complement Bloom’s, even if it doesn’t reach quite the same heights.

However, what gives Carnival Row (season 1) its special flavor is that all of its ingredients work in concert like a well-prepared meal and finely paired wine. It’s full of interesting locales and spicy setups to seemingly promising subplots. Its secondary characters are as nearly rich and fleshed out as that of its leads, and its gritty texture and omnipresent grime become a character unto itself.

As interesting as it is, its primary plot runs a bit thin as it is clearly designed to stretch across multiple seasons. So, a less interesting B-plot is introduced to give season one a sense of completion by the season’s end. Still, it is tied in well enough by crisp pacing and economic dialogue, all supported by the aforementioned performances, that it never drags and gives the audience more than enough to look forward to season 2.

Boasting some very charismatic performances and compelling world-building, season 1 of Carnival Row is Worth it, but only if you are emotionally prepared for the abysmal letdown that is season 2.

WOKE ELEMENTS

• There is an omnipresent and open class struggle with which the filmmakers do a respectable job of restraining their worst activist instincts, considering what is almost certainly their personal political beliefs.
  • Yes, it’s there, and there are clear parallels to modern Leftists’ beliefs about the ruling class and the subjugated minorities as well as capitalism and the working class. However, it’s mostly handled like programs of the past, in which the creators use the actual past as a template to build an interesting show around rather than building it around activism.
    • However, it can get a little tiresome. It might be best to not binge this show but meter it out a few days at a time instead.
  • There is some absolutely hamfisted, completely unbelievable, and narratively unnecessary bi-sexuality jarringly thrust into a few scenes.
    • Alka seltzer mixed with water has more chemistry and effervescence than this relationship, which is utterly ironic considering that Cara Delevingne is a self-described bi-sexual, pansexual, whatever’s-popular-at-the-time sexual. Yet she cannot pull it off on screen.

Carnival Row (season 2)

According to an interview with Orlando Bloom,  COVID brought an abrupt, and I mean an abrupt, end to both the series and the second season of Carnival Row.

With about four months of filming completed before COVID forced them to stop production, you can practically see the moment when the showrunners realized that season 2 would also be the show’s finale. So, instead of focusing on resolving the primary plot and one or two b-plots, the showrunners made the colossal mistake of rushing to cram every sub-plot and secondary character arc that had been designed to breathe and mature over the course of multiple seasons into the remaining handful of episodes.

As a result, every aspect of the show suffers like a bag of kittens thrown off a bridge, with each mewling feline frantically clawing at the ever-constricting burlap as well as each other in an effort to get one last gasp of desperately needed air (it’s a dark show – a dark metaphor seemed appropriate). Plots cease to make sense, the dialogue is repetitive and either meaninglessly pedantic or meaninglessly unsophisticated. Moreover, the performers seem as lost about their character’s motivations as the writers do about how they can possibly force events to conclude the way in which they had originally envisioned. To say that it all feels rushed is an understatement of understatements.

The lack of cohesive storytelling in this season cannot be overstated. By the fourth episode, any semblance of a compelling emotional through-line has been tossed, and you no longer care about anyone or anything that happens in the show.

With a hodgepodge of dangling character arcs and plot holes that spin out of control while being stitched together with rotting catgut and rusty needles of rushed narratives, a bloated cast, and meandering storylines into an unholy Meyrink-like golem of shambling narrative flesh, season 2 of Carnival Row is best forgotten.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Every horrible instinct and thinly veiled Leftist belief of the showrunners barrels its way through the narrative like a runaway Minotaur in this season.

• ***SPOILER ALERT*** The forced and unbearable lesbian relationship between Delevinge’s pixie and another gal pixie whose character was so forgettable that I’ve forgotten her name and so uninteresting that I have no plans to look it up comes to full bloom, and they end up married in the last scene of the series. ***END SPOILER ALERT***
• Out of the blue, Bloom’s Philo gives a 3-minute speech about institutional racism. It’s practically a Young Turks bullet-pointed screed.
• Any finesse or nuance nurtured during season one is chewed up and crapped out in this season.
  • Specifically, we are repeatedly bludgeoned over the head with…
    • Evil and corrupt cops
    • Cartoonish and overt racism
    • The haves and the have nots
    • So much more
• Out of nowhere, one of the main secondary characters squeals out a nonsense diatribe about how her boyfriend doesn’t own her. Mind you, he’s been nothing but excellent to her and has never treated her as anything less than an equal.
• Redistribution of wealth is repeatedly held up as a virtue, even if those who would dole it out are corrupt bullies.
  • The communists, while misguided and cruel, are the only group with a meaningful code of conduct and clearly expressed philosophy.
• The good guy werewolf goes from a fierce and loyal friend to being cuckolded by a lesbian tryst.
• There are numerous Leftist talking point monologues spewed at the audience in this season.
• Men bad. Women good. Rich bad. Natives good. Blah, blah, blah.

The post Carnival Row first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

Fast X

What can be said about Fast X that hasn’t been said about one or every entry in a saga that spans 22 years? Probably nothing. It’s fun and it knows how dumb it is, and if you’re going to enjoy it, you’ve got to leave your brain at the door. However, while the car chases haven’t slowed down over the decades, FF’s now middle-aged actors have. None of the fight scenes are as crisp as their predecessors and the filmmakers have to rely on jump cuts and frenetic cinematography to cover for the aging actors.

Unarguably, the main reason that anyone goes to see a Fast & Furious movie, is for the cool cars, slick races, and outrageous stunts, both practical and digital. In this, Fast X delivers. However, after all of these movies and all of the ridiculous and impossible things that we’ve seen Dom’s family/crew do over the last two decades, the action pieces in Fast X feel largely old-hat and derivative… of themselves. It’s almost like the filmmakers took every component from every other film in the series and put them in a slot machine: giant fast-moving armored truck | Ramsey | remote control override, Ludacris | celebrity cameo | throw-away joke – rinse and repeat.

With that being said, if you hope to enjoy it, it’s important to occasionally remind yourself that the Fast & Furious Saga isn’t for those who are looking for realistic physics, thoughtful and intricate plots, or normal human behavior. It is for someone who is looking for the live-action movie version of playing with matchbox cars as a child. At that time in your life, with sheer will and creative shifting, a rear-wheel drive muscle car could force to ground two powerful helicopters that are tethered to it and have lifted its rear wheels off of the road. So too is it with Fast X.

In the same vein, if you were to put any thought into the actions of the “good guys,” you’d realize that their “missions” are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent people. The safe scene from the fifth FF, which is revisited in Fast X’s prologue, would have to have killed at least 30 people. It makes Bruce’s first time in the Batmobile in Batman Begins look like a leisurely Sunday drive to visit Aunt Dorthy.

In Fast X, the performances range from 100 lbs spindly-armed women doing their best tough-guy face to Jason Momoa’s manic impersonation of a caricature of a woman being visited by the Red Dragon. It’s regrettable that the dialogue isn’t any help. Instead, it reads like someone asked chatGPT to write a script with the most generic action movie dialogue possible, leaving extra moments for mugging and grimacing.

Furthermore, the “brotherly” sniping between Ludacris’s Tej and Tyrese Gibson’s Roman has more than worn out its welcome. In Fast X, it’s more like a tooth being pulled without novocaine. You understand that it has to happen, but you can’t wait until it’s out and done with. In this flick, the two have to fight, so that they can make up right before the twist.

No, instead of the high-octane action enhancing the story, Fast X’s story manages to slam on the breaks and ram viewers’ heads through the narrative’s windshield. Every moment, with the exception of a couple of cute scenes between Dom’s son and brother, played by John Cena, that the characters interact with one another while doing anything other than driving a car drags on for an eternity. One of the main reasons for this is that everything that the characters do is bull$h!t.

Everyone’s iPhone is also a super-hacker MacGuffin that allows them to do or know whatever they need to get to the next set piece, and no one has to work to find anything out. It’s excruciatingly boring. There are absolutely no consequences incurred by anything within the non-action set pieces because each consequence is fixed by a bit of tech that looks like it was ripped out of a Meta Quest game.

In what might be the perfect metaphor for the entire franchise, but most especially Fast X, there’s a scene in which an electronic lock is activated, trapping one of the main cast in a room with a dangerous and hostile man. Fortunately, the super-advanced lock is conveniently and inexplicably accessible via Bluetooth, and the heroes are able to unlock it via bull$h!t. However, after they knowingly unlocked it, they still kick the door in and bust the lock.

It doesn’t help that every other non-action scene has a size 13 boot shoving in another character from the saga’s past entries. At 2.5 hours, that’s a lot of shoving, and all it manages to do is bloat the film, drag the momentum to a halt, and give even less time to the core cast members.

When the checkered flag has been waved and the smell of high test fuel has cleared, fans of the Fast & Furious Saga most likely will enjoy this two+ hour romp. Just make sure to leave your IQ in your other pants. We’d strongly suggest going to a theater that serves alcohol both to improve the movie and because the subsequent potty break will give you an excuse to leave the theater for a few minutes. Don’t worry, you won’t miss anything. I promise that the scene that you leave will still be going on when you get back.

WOKE ELEMENTS

There’s not a lot here, and it’s necessary to remember that this is a movie in which a car ski-jumps off of a giant dam. So, not a lot that’s realistic or consistent with the laws of the universe.

• The lead women all tend to act like cartoon men, with a lot of mugging grimaces while they strain to sound gravelly and menacing.
• Spindly-armed Charlize Theron and 5’5″ Michelle Rodriguez can dominate hand-to-hand combat against fully armored men twice their size.
  • At least Rodriguez looks scrappy.
• The idea that friends and family are the same thing is, of course, central to the entire saga.

The post Fast X first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

Hypnotic

Hypnotic is a plodding mess of expositional nonsense that emotionally neuters itself with every amateurish and wearisome reveal of what it intends to be a mind-blowing twist. Written and directed by Robert Rodriguez, the basic premise is that Ben Affleck’s Danny Rourke is one of the most powerful members of a small cabal of now rogue government agents, known as Hypnotics. They have the ability to build mental constructs within individuals’ minds that cause the subject to behave in whatever way the Hypnotic would like.

It seems that the Hypnotics are on a mission to take over the world but to do so, they need to find Rourke’s daughter who, as the spawn of two of the most powerful Hypnotics, is suspected to be super-duper mega-ultra doppler powerful. Unfortunately for them, Rourke has hidden her away and suppressed his own memory (which is something that they can do). However, Hypnotics can also apparently create triggering clues that will allow them to once again access said memories, and Danny has also done this.

So, in an effort to trick Danny into helping them find his child, they have fabricated an elaborate construct around him. He starts the film thinking that he is a police detective whose daughter was kidnapped four years ago by a man who professes to have no memory of the abduction. Now, Danny finds himself tipped off about a case in which the perpetrator can apparently control people’s minds.

Everything about this movie is hackneyed and half-baked. The timeline makes no sense, if Daddy hid his daughter four years ago and the bad guys have been running Danny through this construct repeatedly since then, how is it that they’ve only run it 12 times? In the film, it took two movie days to complete the program and only a matter of minutes to completely reset it. Shouldn’t they have run him through it several times, or maybe tried a different scenario?

You see, apparently he regularly sees little errors with the construct and comes out of it without giving the bad guys what they want, so they do it all again. Well, since what Danny wants is a world in which the Hypnotics are no longer a threat to Danny and his daughter, and they have the ability to completely fabricate Danny’s reality, why wouldn’t they just fabricate a reality in which the Hypnotics have been destroyed so that Danny leads them to her? Instead, they create a reality full of Hypnotics that only serves to remind Danny of the existence of Hypnotics which is exactly what breaks him out of their spell. It’s one of the dumbest premises to come down the pike in a while (and we live in a world in which Velma is a thing).

The powers are vague and there’s no sense of how powerful any particular individual is. Furthermore, as the group currently stands, I see no reason why they couldn’t take over the world right now. They are incredibly powerful, and it would only take one of them a few minutes to get the ear of the leaders of the World’s major powers.

More than anything though, Danny’s motivation doesn’t make sense. He doesn’t want his daughter trained to be a killer. So, he hides her away with a couple of people who cannot teach her anything about her abilities, like how to control them. Then, he waits until she is older and strong enough to make the entire group of Hypnotics murder themselves in front of her as she looks on menacingly. Boy, it sure is a good thing that neither of her parents was there to help guide her over these formative years, and that she hasn’t been turned into a mass murderer… wait.

Normally in these types of movies, the visuals can make up for a lot of the weakness by giving us something inventive and fun to look at. Unfortunately, in Hypnotic, the eye candy is a mix of the mundane and what looks like pre-rendered and recycled footage from Inception and Dr. Strange. If that weren’t enough, the dialogue is contrived and seemingly cobbled together from dozens of other films (all of which are better than this). The characters are uninteresting and, by virtue of no one ever being real until the last five minutes, impossible to empathize with. It doesn’t help that Ben Affleck looks like he’s ready to fall asleep in each scene and that the rest of the supporting cast is nearly as bad.

Hynotic is the type of high concept that requires thoughtful and metered reveals, characters that you care about, and a goal that you can root for for longer than a couple of minutes at the end. It’s regrettable that no one held up their end of the bargain on this one. At an hour and a half, Hypnotic rushes everything yet manages to feel like a three-hour slog.

When your head clears and your memory returns, Hypnotic is a film that I wish I could forget.

WOKE ELEMENTS

None.

The post Hypnotic first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

SCREAM VI

By now, every moviegoer knows what they are in store for when they sit down to a Scream movie. So, it would seem as though it would be difficult to be disappointed by one. However, the first ten minutes of Scream VI were done so well, with double blinds and thoughtful twists, that it had me believing that this entry into the franchise was going to pick up the fresh and inventive baton that the first one has been trying to pass along for the last 26 years. I thought that it might even keep me guessing or at least caring until the end…I was wrong.

I can almost hear the writers saying, “Yeah but it’s meta,” every time someone pointed out how unoriginal or stupid something was in their script. It’s unfortunate, but Scream VI relies entirely on unlikeable characters, played by mediocre actors, making decisions that no one would ever make. All the while it completely disregards physics and biology whenever the script needs it. To put it plainly, Scream VI is an utter piece of crap.

Immediately following the nail-biting opening, the movie screeches to a bone-jarring stop. The following scene shows the main protagonist, Melissa Barrera’s Sam Carpenter, providing an amateurishly written and needless exposition dump via a contrived therapy session. Its only purpose is so that she can catch the audience up with the events of the previous movie and let us know that she (the daughter of the 1st movie’s Ghostface) enjoyed killing the bad guys in Scream V. It has all the subtlety of The January 6th Committee.

In a movie like Scream VI, ambiguity is king, and it might have actually been interesting to hint at Carpenter’s feelings throughout the film and to keep us guessing if perhaps she was the killer. Unfortunately, either due to a lack of direction, terrible script, or middling talent on her part (probably a little from each column), Barrera doesn’t have what it takes to get that across to the audience in any other way.

She’s not the only one delivering sub-par performances, everyone’s guilty of hamming it up. Unlike the original, however, in which Jamie Kennedy’s Randy was obnoxious but lovable, this uber-diverse group of mostly gen-z’s is ironically homogenous. They exhibit virtually the same personalities, and what little personality they have is banal and shallow.

Having said that, the only truly embarrassingly horrific performance is given by Dermot Mulroney. He is unbelievably over the top, with cartoonish facial expressions and (somehow) lifeless shouting. It’s doubly shocking because he’s been in the business for nearly 40 years and usually gives a fairly solid performance.

However, the movie’s weaknesses don’t end with bland and anemic performances or even over-the-top ones. No, it’s ridiculous on all fronts. There are silly things like Hayden Panettiere dressed in an over-designed black leather biker jacket and ridiculous nickel-plated sidearm to show that all 5’0″ of her is a hard-boiled FBI detective. If that’s not enough to convince you of her bonafides, then her cute little blonde bob and Neutrogena spokes girl looks will do the job.

Then there’s the new Randy, who just so happens to be related to the old Randy, who voluntarily gets on the New York subway on Halloween night without once considering that a cab or Uber might be a better choice. Who, in their right mind would think that getting into an enclosed and inescapable space while surrounded by macabrely dressed strangers would be a good idea? Do you know who wouldn’t? THE REAL RANDY! That’s not the worst of it, the group only realizes AFTER they get on and begin to think that they’ve made a bad choice that there are 10 friggin stops before theirs and they STAY ON FOR THEM ALL!

If that’s not enough, the plot armor couldn’t be any thicker for these characters. Ghostface takes multiple headshots from fists, feet, and even large metal gumball machines. Then, after the unmasking happens, there’s no mark to be seen. I can’t overstate the brutality of the blows delivered upon Ghostface’s noggin.

Not to be outdone, several of the characters receive multiple deep (I mean like 3-4 inches deep) stab wounds and then, with the exception of the initial scream of pain, act as though nothing happened. Seriously, in one scene the Brachial artery of one of the main cast is sliced. The character is quickly losing blood, and only barely manages to get away. In the real world, it can take as few as 90 seconds for a person to bleed to death from a wound like this. However, after some basic 1st aid (delivered multiple hours later) in the next scene, the character is fine and behaving as though it never happened.

Finally, in what is not the last but is the movie’s most egregious display of ineptitude, Scream VI is mostly boring. Sure it has bursts of intense action/violence but nearly half of the picture is spent sitting and talking about the characters’ feelings.

While it offers a couple of good scares, Scream VI is a mostly useless entry into an already-tired franchise. Do yourself a favor and watch the first one again instead.

P.S. Courtney Cox has had so much plastic surgery that she looks like a burn victim after a face transplant.

WOKE ELEMENTS

This was a bit tough because it’s totally possible that the filmmakers decided that woking it up was meta, and did so knowingly. However, the overall ineptitude on display leads me to believe that most, if not all of the woke elements, are not in jokes.

• Mindy is gay solely for the sake of “representation” instead of narrative. While she was introduced in the last film, the activism carried over to this entry.
• Woke physics. Itty bitty girl bosses that can hardly reach the gas pedal can shake off injuries that would stagger a terminator. Seriously, the tallest chick in this thing is 5′ 7″ and probably weighs in at 115 lbs. but that doesn’t stop them from handing out some whoop-@$$ to much larger and stronger opponents. Oh, and every guy is either shut out or taken out of the major action.
• The heroes don’t carry guns. They barely survived the last movie and aren’t anti-violence. In one scene, Sam assaults and tasers a guy in the balls for consensually escorting her sister to his room. Also in her first scene in this film, she admits that she kind of liked killing the bad guys in the last picture. Also also, Sam is paranoid and frightened to near xenophobia in this picture. It’s complete nonsense that she wouldn’t be packing.
• Snarky b!t@h (but only toward well-meaning men) as a celebrated character trait makes its way into the film.
• Friends as family. I can’t be the only one who is sick of the concept that a group of close friends is the same thing as a family. It’s not. Stop it.
• This movie has ALL of the diversity, and since the performances were mostly flat and lackluster, I’m going with diversity for its own sake rather than the best cast having been picked and it is only incidentally diverse enough to star in a Nike commercial.

The post Scream VI first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

Unfortunately, not even Glenn’s high-energy performance can overcome the horrid and amateurish writing and the hashed and re-hashed jokes the writers found crawling out of a bloated and rotting dead horse already kicked by their betters. The opening shows two cockroaches crawling out of a garbage can and begin humping, and that gag is the top of the comedy mountain. From there on, every joke is a self-referential self-aware meta-statement about the state of (what the writers consider to be) current cultural norms, and every gag is a childish sexual one…every gag. It wouldn’t be so bad if even one of them were funny.

HBO’s Velma gives the audience no one for whom to root, no jokes at which to laugh, and no events about which to care. If you want to watch a side-splitting spoof on Scooby-Doo, check out Robot Chicken. If, however, you want to be bored to tears and waste your time and energy, watch Velma.

VELMA WOKE ELEMENTS

The entire show is a woke scree. Don’t believe me? Here’s a snippet of the opening narration, “…sure, normally origin stories are about tall handsome guys struggling with the burden of being handed even more power and, if they are about girls, it’s usually like, “hey, what made this hot chick go crazy?”

Earlier in my review, I mentioned that every joke is a self-referential meta-comment on perceived current cultural norms, and they are. Every single “joke” is just an ultra-Left-woke talking point said with a heavy dose of snark that’s vomited out at high-speed.

Velma and Shaggy have had their races changed because that’s what passes for creativity in today’s writer’s rooms.

Freddie is white, rich, and handsome. Therefore, he’s dumb, racist, self-absorbed, shallow, and has a small d!@k; and his manly wealthy dad is a toxic chauvinistic bully.

Daphne is a drug-dealing slut and bisexual, and, of course, Velma is as well.

Oh, and at one point, a black character is needlessly and randomly harassed by the police.

The sexualizing of children. From the opening nude shower/fight scene and throughout every d!@k joke, the main characters are around 15 years old.

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