Film Round-Up: 21 Bridges, Midway and Knives Out!
More films to isolate yourself to!
21 Bridges
Chadwick Boseman leads the New York Police as they hunt for two men that killed eight police officers. You know when you are looking for a film on Netflix and you end up looking at all the thrillers which tend to have one recognisable star, then a bland plot with bland action. If they need a bit of gravitas, they are often based on a book that was sold in a train station for a week in 2013. Well somehow, one of them ended up in the cinema before settling in its real home of VOD. 21 Bridges is a perfectly decent thriller with an interesting though completely unexplored thread about Boseman’s character not wanting to shoot anyone when everyone else in the NYPD fancies a murder spree. But that’s what it is, a decent thriller. Two days on from watching it the only thing I really remember is that the score was very very loud. It will fill your time without offending too much but won’t raise the pulse too much.
Midway
The US Navy are fighting a losing battle in the Pacific Theatre against Japan. They have one chance to turn that around and that is going to happen at Midway. Modern war films have been excellent, using modern filming techniques to plant us, the viewer, right with the soldiers. This has made them more into an experience than a true narrative. But if you long for the days of war films lasting about five hours and not much happening, you might find room for this one. I don’t because this is basically a love letter to Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbour which was a bad movie and this repeats everything wrong with that movie. Well apart from a terrible romance, but it replaces that with feeling very dated because this feels like a movie from the early 2000s. It has long, rah-rah America is Great scenes which definitely feel like they are from another era and it just has that feel from a film of that era. Admittedly, the battle scenes are pretty cool but when your film is over two hours, you need more than that. Maybe if you are nostalgic for Pearl Harbour, the film not the event you sickos, you’ll enjoy this but it’s not for me.
Knives Out
The patriach of the Trombey family dies in suspicious circumstances. Benoit Blanc investigates. Ooh boy the hype. The hype going into this film. When it was released, everyone went nuts praising the movie and some put it right at the top of their Top 10 of 2019 lists. That hype definitely hurts the movie coming to it a few months later. Because while this is a very good movie, I don’t feel it’s the gamechanger that people were hailing it as at the end of last year. It is very clever and well written, it has a funny twisty story with a lot of vibrant characters. No scene feels wasted and it is very entertaining despite a lengthy run time. The plot is suitably twisty as well with the movie always being about to take another interesting turn. It also looks great, with the Thrombey manor being an incredible setting and the soon to be iconic chair with all the knives being a particular highlight. My problems around the film are around the talk, basically I expected something amazing and got something merely great. That’s on me though rather than anyone else so you should still go see it.
