Tag: film-reviews-tag/features

Even if you aren’t a fan of Friedkin’s film, there is no denying the power of its iconic sequences: the arrival of Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) at Chris’s house on a foggy night; Regan’s head twisting around; the aforementioned swearing, vomiting, and crucifix misuse. Green’s film offers nothing to compare with these. There are no images you might put on a poster or a T-shirt, no scenes you might lampoon in a parody. I don’t know whether a new film could ever be as upsetting and transgressive as The Exorcist was, but it would have been nice if Green had had a crack at it, instead of serving up imitations of what Friedkin created all those years ago. It was startling to see Blair encased in pale, puffy, scar-streaked prosthetic make-up in the 1973 film. Sticking the same make-up on two young actresses today is about as startling as a trip to a high-street fancy-dress shop.

The rushed, unscary and frankly silly climax has Victor putting together a squad of multi-faith demon-busters, as if he is assembling the Avengers or picking a team for an action-packed heist movie. “Anyone else wanna leave, better leave now,” he says, looking and sounding far too badass to be an anxious dad in a horror drama. “Once we start, we’re not stopping.” And so it is that a film that was shaping up to be an intelligent and respectful homage to The Exorcist descends to the depths of a cheesy, straight-to-streaming rip-off. Viewers should do what Victor advises, and leave.

★★☆☆☆

The Exorcist: Believer is released on 6 October.

If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

The balance between the Star Wars side of things and the war drama side is exemplified by the location shooting. Much of the film was shot among the verdant mountains, fields and towering, dagger-like islands of Thailand, which means that it’s spectacular, but also that the combat seems to be happening in real places, with plenty of troubling imagery that recalls the Vietnam War via Apocalypse Now. The futuristic CGI is incorporated so seamlessly that the spell is never broken. Even when robots, simulants and armoured hovercraft are on screen, you can’t see the joins between the physical and the digital.

Still, it would have been close to impossible for Edwards to get the balance between tones exactly right. The escapades in the rushed last act are harder to believe than those earlier on, and the initial ethical questions are soon forgotten. Some of the technology in the film’s 2070 seems less advanced and less frightening than the technology that is being used today, too. One jarring plot point is that everyone is amazed that a child-like simulant has been manufactured, whereas the boffins in M3GAN cracked that problem a year ago.

But there is no denying that The Creator is a major new sci-fi adventure. If you’re partial to such things, Edwards’ ambitious, immersive film should prompt the intoxicating awe that you might have got from The Matrix and Avatar – the feeling that you’re seeing a rich vision of the future unlike any that has been on the big screen before.

★★★★★

The Creator is released in the UK on 28 September and the US on 29 September.

If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

The live-action film uses trained dogs enhanced with special effects, with the occasional human on screen. Will Forte plays Doug, Reggie’s owner, a loser stoner who kept the dog out of spite when his girlfriend left him. Doug keeps trying to lose Reggie, dropping him off far away, but Reggie believes it’s a game they’re playing, which he wins by coming back. Ferrell is perfect for the role, bringing the same sweet, guileless enthusiasm he showed in Elf, and he’s so shrewd an actor that he’s actually touching when Reggie says, “I really just want to be home.”

When Doug finally drops Reggie in a mean alley, he meets the scrappy Bug, who insists that being a stray is the only way to live. You’re free of pesky humans, and can have sex with anything you want, including a random couch left on the street. Foxx sounds a lot as though he’s channelling Samuel L Jackson here, which isn’t a bad thing. Between the crude language and the streetwise delivery, it’s almost as if Quentin Tarantino had made a dog movie. In fact, the director is Josh Greenbaum, who did Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar and who keeps the action moving swiftly. 

When Bug finally convinces Reggie that Doug does not love him, Reggie decides to make his way back and bite off the one thing Doug loves the most, his penis. It’s funnier when Ferrell says it. And technically, that means Strays qualifies as a revenge movie.

Over the past year, Warner Bros’ DC superhero films seem to have suffered a severe case of Kryptonite poisoning. Black Adam, Shazam! Fury of the Gods and The Flash all crashed and burned at the box office, and it’s not likely that their new offering, Blue Beetle, is going to save the day. It was always a long shot, mind you. Compared to Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, Blue Beetle is a lesser known, fuzzily defined character: his main claim to fame is that he inspired Nite Owl in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ classic graphic novel, Watchmen. But if the Blue Beetle film had had enough fresh ideas, its protagonist’s obscurity might not have been an issue. Unfortunately, the average beetle has more fresh ideas than this one.

More like this:

–       ‘Like it was written by ChatGPT’

–       Meg 2: The Trench is ‘plain awful’

–       The 1961 film that was eerily prescient

The story begins as Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) returns to his hometown, the futuristic, fictional, and horribly fake-looking Palmera City, having studied for a pre-law degree in Gotham. He doesn’t say whether he met Bruce Wayne while he was at university, but things didn’t go well for his family in the meantime. His dad (Damián Alcázar) is recovering from a heart attack, and the family is about to be kicked out of its cosy barrio house by developers from the evil Kord corporation. Nonetheless, Jaime apparently has no qualms about getting a job as a cleaner for the corporation’s villainous CEO, Victoria (Susan Sarandon), or about flirting with Victoria’s non-villainous niece, Jenny (Bruna Marquezine). For reasons that aren’t clear, Victoria is obsessed with creating cyborg Robocops with the help of a small extra-terrestrial device called The Scarab. But, much to her annoyance, this shiny metal bug chooses Jaime as its host. After it attaches itself to his spine, he is wrapped in an ugly exoskeleton that allows him to fly, blast people with energy beams, and do various other generic super things.

(Image credit: Amazon Prime Video)

The end of The Meg teased Jonas’s romance with the oceanographer Suyin, who had a young daughter, Meiying (Sophia Cai). In the sequel, we learn that Suyin has died, and Jonas seems to be 14-year-old Meiying’s stepfather. It’s all murky, but relationships were never The Meg’s strength. Suyin’s brother, Jiuming, has also joined the institute. He is played by Wu Jing, a Chinese superstar. His presence speaks to the film’s global box-office aspirations, but he fits in smoothly in a bland, unexciting role. Cliff Curtis returns as the level-headed manager, Mac, and Page Kennedy sits behind a computer as DJ. He is the film’s meta voice, the “Don’t go in the house” guy.  

Jonas takes a crew that includes Jiuming and even little Meiying (don’t ask how; it’s ridiculous) 25,000ft below the ocean floor to explore a trench that these megalodons seem to be escaping from. When things inevitably go wrong and every major character is in danger and soaking wet, the gang end up in a raft. “This feels unpleasantly familiar,” DJ says, and another veteran of The Meg says, “I just hope it goes better than last time.” Ha. That rare moment, with the audience meant to laugh knowingly, stands out. DJ seems to be in a different movie, especially when he takes out a gun to defend them from the supersharks and says, “I even made poison-tipped bullets, just like Jaws 2”. No other character is that aware that they live in an echo of other movies.

The director, Ben Wheatley, is the latest indie filmmaker to take on a big commercial project, as Taika Waititi did spectacularly with Thor: Ragnarok and Chloé Zhao less so with Eternals. Wheatley’s films are quirky and different from each other, ranging from black comedy Sightseers, to the eco-thriller In the Earth. But each has a single distinctive tone, something the floundering Meg 2 lacks.

Another nagging problem is that so much of the film is so familiar. Like the previous two Mission: Impossible episodes, both directed by McQuarrie, this one uses stunts and locations we’ve already seen in recent Bond movies (including a conveniently deserted Venice). What’s worse is that it uses stunts and locations we’ve already seen in other movies, too. Maybe there are just too many globe-trotting thriller franchises these days, but when Ethan chases some bad guys through the desert on horseback, it’s like a scene in John Wick Chapter 4, which came out in March. And when his car goes bumping down the Spanish Steps in Rome, it’s like a scene in Fast X, which came out in May.

Bearing in mind the films which inspired Cruise and McQuarrie, it might have been more appropriate if Ethan and Grace had been swanning around the French Riviera instead. But maybe McQuarrie is saving that for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two, which is due to be released in a year’s time.

★★★★☆

Mission: Impossibe – Dead Reckoning Part Two is released on 10 July.

Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world.

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.