Film Round-Up: Greta, Escape Room and The Kid Who Would Be King

Let’s get on with it then and review some movies!

Greta

Chloe Grace Moretz strikes up a friendship with Isabella Huppert but when she tries to break it off Huppert turns into a deranged stalker. This is some really fun schlock. Moretz does a good job playing the innocent girl being driven crazy by a stalker while Huppert is having so much fun playing the titular Greta, a woman whose been driven crazy because of her desperate need to mother someone. All the scenery is being chewed on is what I’m saying. The longer the movie goes on the crazier it gets and that’s where it will probably lose some. It takes some huge narrative leaps which some are going to hate but because I realised that the movie was far less serious than it was pretending to be, I was able to have so much fun in the final third. It’s flawed but it’s definitely a fun movie.

Escape Room

A grab bag of characters are invited to take part in an exclusive escape room which turns out to be a trap designed to kill them. This is basically Final Destination for the modern age, taking advantage of the popularity of escape rooms. It’s not a bad idea but it’s not executed as it should have been. The fun of Final Destination is the ironic deaths and the creativity in them but they get it completely wrong here. Even though these escape rooms have been designed for people based on their backstories, they don’t get killed off by them and are usually offed in some other, much more bland way. I can’t say the movie is awful, the acting is decent and the set pieces well laid out, but it does fail to be scary or be a lot of fun.

The Kid Who Would Be King

A kid discovers that he is descended from King Arthur and has the power to wield Excalibur. However he then has to defeat a returning Morgana. This is classic kids stuff with the generic bullied child discovering he is a hero and then rising to the occasion. Thankfully there’s no prophecy but it amounts to the same thing. The first half of the movie is poor as there’s an over reliance on cringe humour and to be quite frank, our lead is a bit of an idiot as well so it’s hard to warm to him for a while. But once the movie has got over that and the petty squabbles between the main cast, it settles down into a satisfying if unoriginal kids film. You know, pretty fun but nothing that you are going to remember in a weeks time. This movie was made to keep kids happy on a rainy afternoon and I imagine it will be able to exactly that.