Film Round-Up: Frankie, Dream Horse and The Boss Baby: Family Business
Let’s do this!
Frankie
The matriach of a family takes them on a holiday to a Portuguese village as they all contemplate the future. Just as cinema can offer us brash mad films like Mortal Kombat, they can also offer us very subtle offerings like Frankie. This is a very slow film as we see a family fraying at the edges with something massively lifechanging about to happen. But then nothing happens. It’s a film where people walk through a beautiful Portuguese village, stop to have a conversation and then walk to another place to have another conversation. By the end of the movie, no one has really changed. There’s no great revelation in the moment, nothing which really stuns you and makes you think. Well, apart from one rather creepy conversation about having sex with a stepsister, and that was not memorable in a good way. The film is expertly acted and you can see why so many big names were attracted to this script as it allowed all to do some great work in a beautiful location. It’s the acting which keeps you going, trusting something big and worth it is around the corner. But with the film ending without as much as a fizzle, never mind a bang, it ends up being just a nice and gentle waste of time.
Dream Horse
A woman gets her village in the heart of the Welsh valleys to form a syndicate so they can breed a race horse. You have seen Dream Horse. I know it’s only just come out but you have seen this film. You may not know it but you have. That’s because this film follows a formula set down by The Full Monty which has been copied by about five million mid-range British films. A group of plucky working class people do something outrageous in order to bring hope to their miserable poor lives, often winding up some rich toff in the process. This is that film again, just with a horse rather than a choir or a band made up of fishermen. You will know everything that is about to happen way before it happens. However, every predictable beat and cliché is done very well and this is probably one of the best examples of these films in recent years. it’s well acted and well executed, so you do have to respect it for that. It’s very likable and does what it means to do, so you can’t fault it despite it being as predictable as a newly famous person having said something daft on Twitter when he was a teenager.
The Boss Baby: Family Business
In the sequel to The Boss Baby, a grown up Tim finds out his baby daughter Tabitha is part of BabyCorp. She regresses him and his brother Ted to being infants again to foil a plot at a local school. The first Boss Baby is one of the worst mainstream animated films I have ever seen and this one is thankfully better. Though not much better as it is still incredibly annoying and you shouldn’t inflict this on your children. It still has very weak humour, though there are two times I chuckled so there is that, and it never executes on its themes. At the start, there’s a big set up about the idea of trying to make sure children get to be children and not grow up. The film does the exact sum of nowt to explore this idea, dropping it as soon as they raised it. I think the script editor forgot to put it on his memory stick before he was forced to work from home from the pandemic and just lied to his bosses that he edited it. Also, you know that trick animated films do by sneaking dirty jokes so kids don’t notice it? Really offputting when they are making blowjob jokes around a baby. Which I am also pretty sure the first film did too. What’s Dreamworks obsession with making blowjob jokes about dummies? And that last sentence is why you shouldn’t watch this.
