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Sweet Girl (2021)
Where is everyone?
*Heavy Spoilers*
I could not complete the movie, I could only get to the halfway point. It got too frustrating to watch. This movie takes place in a complete vacuum. Here's the breakdown:
There's an assassination, then a fight to the death with the assassin on a crowded subway. These dudes wrestle around and bust through glass, while the subway tram kindly waits for their fight to end before moving again. There's not a single soul nearby, despite being crowded moments before the fight.
Next main guy decides he's gonna go beat up the evil pharm guy. He musters all his cunning to sneak into a charity banquet as if he's James Bond. Somehow he gets a waiter uniform his size, finds a hair stylist to get the perfect manbun, and blocks off the MAIN RESTROOM with an out of order sign. Now with the ridiculous trap set, he'll purposely dump wine on the evil dude and walk away normally, going somehow unnoticed by everyone, despite being several feet taller and wider than everyone there. Now the ghost town theme returns as he ambushes the evil guy trying to use the MAIN RESTROOM, takes the fight to an adjacent hallway, and ends up with a gun going off. Not a single soul from the entire party sees or hears this until later when bodyguard 1 comes back from being unconscious.
Next the main guy and his overly teenage daughter flee to somewhere in Canada maybe? It's not quite clear. But they end up at some motel where the only person there is apparently the front desk lady. Using the power of the ghost town theme, he sets up jingle bells in the MAIN HALLWAY so he can hear them if the MAIN DOOR is opened. Since not a single soul lives, rents, or even cleans this motel, he can rest easy knowing his alarm is only going to go off when there's a threat of an assassin. This of course works like a charm and his ingenious alarm of a couple jingle bells hanging down the hall from his motel room wake him from a dead sleep, and the fight is on. It's a loud fight with many gunshots and an eventual window break/car crash, but nobody's around to care! Even the daughter doesn't care. She literally moves outside and stands at the side of the road with her arms crossed waiting expectantly for the fight to the death to wrap up already. Later, the FBI gets a hot tip from a ghost who saw the whole thing.
Then we come to the part where I had to stop watching:
While fleeing/finding a new place to hide, main guy says "welp, here looks like a great spot to drive into the woods and hide out." He then uses the power of the ghost town again to cut a tree down to block a main road, and move some construction barriers around. Don't worry, nobody will come along to move or report these things. Main guy then consults the scrolls and determines his next target happens to live nearby his road barrier, and he divines that the evil guy will be taking his convoy down this very road tonight! None of this is explained or shown, so we have to assume he's psychic or something. Main guy then manages to get the convoy stuck in his trap and comes in out of nowhere with a big ol construction vehicle that I guess we're supposed to assume the nonexistent crew left unattended, unsecured, and with keys in it. Then subway assassin guy makes his return by shooting comically explosive shotgun bullets at the convoy as well, destroying it for some reason. Main dude gets freaked out by assassin rival and flees.
This is where I had to turn it off. There was still 45 mins left, which actually made me laugh out loud at the sheer absurdity. The main dude is the world's worst brawler, has a "code" where using guns is morally wrong, and has an insufferable teen daughter who can't stop crying or being dramatic. All of his wile-e-coyote plans end up with him in a brawl while there are ZERO onlookers.
I have no intention on ever watching the last 45 minutes, but I think the only way this movie could pull itself out of this awful writing is to reveal a twist where it turns out the main guy is actually capable of entering the shadow realm every time he tackles someone, and while he's there he gets psychic visions on what exactly to do next.
Monster Hunter: Legends of the Guild (2021)
A Short Story for Fans of MH World
I'm not quite sure if the studio was simply testing their chops at making animated features, but there's some potential here.
The animation looked better than most current Netflix releases, aside from some stiff movement or blank expressions here and there. At one point I paid close attention to the English lip syncing and it was pretty believable. There's a lot of good texturing and it all looks very faithful to the source material.
The plot is a brief backstory to the young hunter of the 5th fleet, Aiden. Along the way, we get some lore and get a feel of what fighting some monsters would really be like without any carts or potions. The plot never falls apart, because there's no time for it to. It's incredibly fast paced and it doesn't allow much time to develop anything deeper than a flashback.
The dialog is hammy, yet true to the games. There was way too much puns for me, but they were made tongue-in-cheek so it's somewhat forgivable.
They used all the familiar original Monster Hunter sounds any fan would recognize, the voices matched how the characters should sound, and the music didn't get in the way.
*SPOILERS*
I was deeply disappointed "Proof of a Hero" didn't play once Lunastra got hit with the dragonator. This is a mandatory thing to do and it would've added a "hell yeah!" moment to the scene, especially if the hunters all ganged up on her after being hit like any good hunter would. But instead there was SILENCE after she was hit and the hunters stood around like "oh good that did it." I would've given an extra star (or maybe even 2) if this scene was wrapped up with an adrenaline filled desperate fight to the end with Proof of a Hero blasting in the background.
Transformers: War for Cybertron (2020)
Slag
Review of "Kingdom" with the Beast Wars crossover.
Voice acting: Abysmal. Nobody sounded like they should, or even tried to sound like they should. The lines were delivered either very woodenly or exaggerated with that garbage heavy anime breathing trope. No clever Megatron voice, no Brooklyn Rattrap, no smooth Tigertron, no angry Dinobot. Nobody put any emphasis in their lines, they sound like generic dudes trying to ham their lines. This was the biggest crime made by the show.
Writing: Boring and out of character. Sure maybe Blackarachnia was being treacherous as always, but Optimus Primal going off half-cocked and super aggressive like a (hmmm) dumb ape really tarnishes everything the original Beast Wars built up for the great leader of the Maximals. Other characters were acting much more generic than themselves as well, like Rattrap.
Plot: Needlessly complicated. Beast Wars already pushed a little too far with time travel and aliens, but now there's even more time travel and now 4 teams mixing it up. There's too many characters and that always leaves a handful of them being totally ignored between episodes or worse: they get screen time but they're completely generic, maybe even...robotic?
Sound: Annoying. For whatever reason the Autobot/Decepticon sound bytes are being used for the Beast Wars too. The Beast Wars transformers have their own established transformation sound, blaster sound, walking sound, computer sounds, you name it. So lazy.
Animation: Eyesore. There are cheap 2D textures slapped right onto these models and they have very unsettling robot mouths. Beast Wars doesn't look exceptional nowadays, but it was state of the art back in its time. This show has put forth very little effort in these character models.
What a disappointment. This has no business having a score higher than 3. I'd give it a zero if I could. I'm practically insulted on behalf of Beast Wars fans. All the voice actors, writers, and animators who worked so hard on Beast Wars should be pretty upset with how their show is being mangled.
What Happened to Monday (2017)
Good premise ruined by bad writing
This movie has an interesting premise which could go in a lot of different directions. Unfortunately, the writers chose a very predictable and over-the-top path which really soured the movie. Without giving too much away, my biggest gripes are the unbelievably aggressive way the government handles any problems, the laughably bad "hacking" at the end, and the cheesy acting by both the main antagonist and protagonist.
There were more than a few times where my wife and I called out what was going to happen as we laughed at how dumb it would be if it did, then the movie proved us right, causing some real "wtf" moments.
Points for creativity and costuming, everything else was done poorly.
Shinseiki Evangelion (1995)
Striking Visuals, Poor Writing
This show starts out great, especially from the intro, which they absolutely nailed. From there, they write themselves into a corner and decide to lean into their only strength, which is visuals. However, the clumsy and nonsensical Christian visuals end up only adding questions to the already convoluted plot. The ending is so terrible, they had to write and animate a new one, which also ended up terrible, aside from one great action scene. The way the entire show went, you can tell nobody had a plan and just winged it.
None of the characters develop, they remain the same kind of person from start to finish, and man are they awful. Shinji is easily in my top 5 most hated of main characters. There is nothing entertaining about him; he is a cowardly, neurotic creep who has to be dragged kicking and screaming into any plot point.
Overall, the series gets a 3/10, with points for sweet visual style, good sound, and an intriguing concept. But loses points for plot, characters, writing, off-putting teen nudity, and for fumbling it's own rewrite of the ending. There's a lesson here to be learned by future writers.