Rami Malek shines in this gripping cat-and-mouse revenge thriller, following one man’s quest to snuff out everyone involved in his wife’s murder.
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Gladiator II (2024)
I went into this thinking Denzel Washington’s presence alone could save the movie, but I was sorely mistaken. His character’s lack of development was… well, lacking. Honestly, does anyone even understand what his actual motivation was? It felt like the script just skipped over any meaningful explanation.
In fact, the entire movie suffers from underwhelming character development. The direction rushes through every moment, completely bypassing any emotional weight. The scenes don’t even give you a chance to breathe or reflect on what just happened. It’s all too quick, too shallow, and ultimately unrewarding.
Even the dialogue falls flat. The monologues feel forced, and the actors seem more focused on ticking off boxes than actually delivering their lines with any real conviction or emotion. There’s no sense of pacing, just a constant rush to get to the next thing.
And don’t even get me started on the nostalgia attempt. It’s as if they tried so hard to invoke it, but gave barely any time to actually craft a unique story. The corrupt emperor trope is so overdone by now that we didn’t need to see it again. It just felt like a missed opportunity for something fresh or original.
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Venom: The Last Dance (2024)
Boring, uneventful, and exhaustingly underdeveloped.
Without a doubt, this is the worst Venom adaptation I’ve seen yet—completely stale and lifeless at every turn. The plot felt like a lost child wandering around Disneyland, clinging to anyone who looked familiar, desperately hoping they’d finally find the right one this time. It just aimlessly stumbles from one place to the next, never finding its footing.
The subplots? Pointless. They have absolutely no connection to the previous movies, making them feel like filler that shouldn’t even be there. Then there are the overdramatic scenes, shoved down your throat with blaring, corny music in an obvious attempt to force some kind of emotional response. It’s all so try-hard that you can’t help but roll your eyes.
In the end, it’s just a wasted opportunity—dull, disjointed, and completely forgettable.
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The Crow (2024)
What a fucking waste.
Forget a candle, this doesn’t even hold a matchstick to the original.
Every major plot point in this movie felt like wandering into Bed Bath & Beyond, desperately asking every employee, including the manager, what “beyond” actually means, only for all of them to respond with vague, empty assurances like, “It’s great!”—and nothing more.
The character arcs? Totally unnatural and lacking any real progression. It’s as if the writers just slapped on some half-baked drama without bothering to connect the dots. And don’t even get me started on the soundtrack—it felt like every scene was designed around a cliché, lipstick-smeared “love me, I’m broken” note scrawled across a bathroom mirror. Cringe doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Boring, unimaginative, and utterly pointless. It’s like the movie tried to say something but forgot what it was halfway through. Skip this one—it’s not worth the energy.
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Twisters (2024)
This movie might as well be titled “Windy with a Chance of Cuck,” because that’s exactly the vibe it gives off. It’s like someone threw a Hallmark movie into a blender with every cliché and stereotype they could think of and hit “puree.” The result? A cringeworthy mess that feels more like a parody than a genuine attempt at storytelling.
The checklist of tropes is absolutely exhausting:
- Sad white girl? ✅ Of course.
- Desperate third-wheel guy who’s only there to be the audience’s punching bag? ✅ Naturally, we’ve got to make him unlikable so the plot feels justified.
- Perfect, smiling model boyfriend? ✅ Sure, why not.
- Out-of-town, also-perfect model “protagonist” that the sad girl just has to fall in love with? ✅ Check and mate.
To make it worse, the dialogue is laughably bad. The actors look like they’re reading their lines off cue cards they barely understand, and the script is packed with buzzwords meant to sound profound but only manage to come off as hollow.
And then there’s the soundtrack. Calling it distracting would be generous. At one point, I had to mute the movie entirely just to save myself from the auditory assault. Honestly, it was a marked improvement—so much so that I almost forgot I needed the audio to follow the “story.”
The final blow? That “E-5” tornado. Forget the damage to the town—it obliterated any remaining shred of credibility this film had. This wasn’t just a disaster movie; it was a disaster of a movie. Yikes out of 10.
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The Creator (2023)
The Creator takes a jab at the ever-growing trendy A.I. wagon — but hits a pebble and sends the whole thing hopelessly toppling over like one of those Boston Dynamics dogs if you kicked it down the stairs.
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Mortal Kombat (2021)
AD1MZ didn’t even want to write about this when he finished it, so I’ll talk about it instead—though not for long, as there’s not much to dig into here.
As for anything good, I’d say there are occasional flashes of solid fight choreography for the half of the cast that can actually fight. Unfortunately, the other half—those with speaking roles—mostly come off as Disney Channel rejects. And even when the action is decent, it’s smothered by terrible editing. The wide shots are so far out that they make the characters look like ants in a landscape shot, making their inclusion jarring whether during a fight or a dialogue scene.
Deliberate campy stupidity can be enjoyable, but it quickly becomes exhausting when there’s nothing to ground the audience. Watching these characters repeatedly let their target run off just so they can fight someone else feels like taking a tour through an Alzheimer’s clinic with orientalist interior design that exclusively treats MMA fighters.
Part of the reason this isn’t fun to watch (unless you’re already a fan—and even then, there’s plenty here to piss fans off) is that it knows it’s dumb and campy, lifting from a whole library of kung-fu B-movie junk, yet it never elevates that material into something greater. The games’ convoluted timeline may have required a bachelor’s degree in horology to fully understand, but at least the story served as connective tissue between the spectacle fights. If you didn’t care about the lore, you could ignore it and still have fun with the inherent “gaminess” of it all. But when this movie thrusts its nonsensical plot to center stage under the guise of a franchise starter, it’s like watching a comedian laugh at his own jokes before he’s even finished telling them. And they’re all jokes I’ve heard before from better comedians.
It’s charmless, trash-culture recycling itself over and over. Watching this made me understand how people who don’t care about Tarantino’s inspirations might view his movies—like being force-fed a bunch of things he loves while he directly lifts from his favorites, never converting the uninitiated. And while I don’t personally feel that way about Tarantino, this movie made that perspective easier to grasp. I hope it’s happy for that revelation.
The biggest frustration is how much of this movie isn’t actually about this movie. It’s just setup for the next one. Normally, this is where I’d say it feels like an extended trailer for a real cut that’s yet to come, but MK2021 barely even bothers with that. Instead, it wastes time rattling off about “prophecies” and “realms,” dumping unnecessary exposition that doesn’t impact the immediate story in any meaningful way. Sure, we get to see Goro—but he comes and goes so quickly, without any introduction to who or what he is. And since practically every character in this franchise, male, female, or otherwise, has the same chiseled, muscular build, you’d think a four-armed brick shithouse would stand out as someone worthy of a bit more backstory. Instead, he’s just another generic henchman.
If you came into this without prior knowledge of Mortal Kombat, you’d leave knowing just as little as when you started.
And here’s the rub with the fanboy defense of, “Of course it’s supposed to be bad! That’s what makes it fun!”—if this didn’t have the attachment to an already beloved fighting game franchise with trademark gory finishing moves, what would be left? If not for that M-for-Mature appeal tickling the nostalgia trigger, would there really be a committed fanbase pretending this cartoonish stupidity is “cool” or “fun”? It was never about the story. It was always just a series of tangents we tolerated because we already had the violence and knew there was more coming.
Speaking of which, the gore in this is surprisingly sparse. The fatalities? Barely there. And they cut the tournament, making me wonder why this wasn’t just called Barney’s Magic Treehouse for all it mattered. The Kung Lao fatality and Jax’s kill were fine, I suppose. The fight between Sub-Zero and Scorpion was decent, considering everything we had to wade through beforehand. But I genuinely thought the main guy in the bronze suit was going to die, go to the Netherrealm, and become the new Scorpion—or his spirit’s next iteration—because at least that would’ve been more interesting than only seeing Scorpion in the intro and then having him fuck off until the last 20 minutes.
And look, I know it’s a reductive comparison, but credit where it’s due to Paul W.S. Anderson’s Mortal Kombat (1995). Say what you want about that movie—like how most of its goodwill rides on nostalgia rather than objective quality—but at least a non-fan could watch it and still understand what the three main characters wanted and why they were at the tournament. This movie procrastinates from its own titular tournament with useless origin filler, then looks at the clock and says, “Whoops! Guess you’ll have to tune in next time when Shang Tsung… uh… really means it!?”
There are rumors of executive meddling, and while I’m on the fence about placing blame, I’m also not invested enough in this series to care. I can see the push to Marvel-ize the franchise—pretending to take the canon seriously while telling it poorly—but I doubt that a lack of meddling would’ve fixed the janky editing, generic set design, unrelatable performances, or the general lack of direction. I was dreading Johnny Cage’s introduction, but this movie was so boring that I actually missed that walking meme of a man, just to add some zest to the dreary affair.
If you enjoyed this, either as a fan or a newcomer, that’s cool. I’d like to find a version of this that I could have fun with someday. Hell, if this had just been Enter the Dragon with well-edited one-on-one fights—doesn’t even need to be groundbreaking, just stop cutting on every hit—with enough gore to make Takashi Miike wonder if he’s getting old, and the classic characters delivering their pun-filled fatality announcements instead of some random background announcer doing it, then I could’ve had fun with it.
But as it stands?
★½ out of 5.
HBO Max continues to suck the fun out of their releases.
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Raya and The Last Dragon (2021)
Saving the world, again — but this time with a kickass baby, three monkeys, one soup chef, a 12-year-old overgrown man-child, and a My Little Pony enthusiast.
Raya wasn’t the best thing I’ve seen from Disney, but not the worst. To start 2021 off, this was a disappointment for me. Not only did the animation at points look rushed — clay and/or plastic textures — but the detail Disney has dumped into its movies throughout previous years was simply not here.
Barely beyond the edge of generic, characters with extremely simple and almost mind-numbing arcs stumble through a story that feels like an excuse to add filler rather than progress anything meaningful. Character traits scarcely change while lessons are being “learned,” and we get to know one thing though — the classic power of friendship defeats all evil.
Way to go.
Remember My Little Pony? You’ll get massive nostalgia from this copy-and-paste character design, so no need to worry about children’s appeal. Which, if we’re being honest, the audience for this is definitely younger children. Now, I don’t want to get too much into the depth of the story because I’m sure Southwest Asia — where this film took most of its influence from — has different ways of thinking (duh, that’s what culture is) than the Western world. But that doesn’t mean I have to necessarily like it. (The story, not the culture — calm down.)
As you can pretty much guess at this point — I didn’t like it.
I didn’t like the antagonist. I didn’t like the moral ambition to “do good.” I didn’t like the shallow portrayal of honesty. I didn’t like the empty save-the-world mentality of “help thy neighbor.”
There’s nothing very positive I have to say about this film. It simply lacked everything that would have made it enjoyable. The soundtrack even fell on deaf ears — none of us even remember when it really impacted the film or moved a specific idea or scene forward.
The so-called complex issues the characters needed to face have been shown so many times before, and it felt like I was just watching a recycled Moana — but this time done by an up-and-coming animation studio trying to capitalize on a marketable copy. To be real, they felt like petty drama if nothing else. Sure, this is a metaphor for our broken society — that we all have to work together to achieve blah blah blah —
But come on, Disney.
Children get these moral values fed to them through TV and other influential propaganda they eat up all day being this heavily exposed to media outlets. Doing something original would have been so much more interesting — and rewarding — for the viewer. Now, all you turnips who are gonna say something like “Oh, this is for kids, why are you so high-strung about it?” — just… perish. You all know damn well Disney is not only for kids, and the films they release are not only for kids.
I enjoyed that every female character was a strong, independent woman who could handle it all — but didn’t like the sting in the back of my throat that the guys were, well — dull, stupid brutes, or simply irrelevant. Besides the obvious exception of her father, the rest of the male cast was comedic relief — or at best there to push a narrative for a few seconds.
Going back to my problems with the animation and art direction:
- Mountain texture felt flat.
- The render felt rushed.
- The water in certain scenes felt looped and unfinished.
- Wave foam looked like it was fuzz.
- Transitions felt unplanned and thrown in.
- Quips in dialogue were clunky and unneeded.
- Comedic banter was cringe and meaningless — it did nothing to develop a character more than we already understood.
- Particle effects and atmospheric VFX were almost non-existent until the end of the film when things finally started happening.
- Facial animations weren’t even on par with what I’ve seen from indie companies.
- Bone structure was extremely minimalistic and bubble-like.
- Jawlines didn’t exist, and curvature around areas of the face was ignored completely.
- Bone rigging within the face when emotion was being portrayed did not look like it was properly reviewed.
Well, this has been your neighborhood review man, and this — well, this kinda sucked.
