Leezy's Movie Reviews

#443/#160 Journey 2: The Mysterious Island

When Vernian Sean Anderson (Josh Hutcherson) receives a coded message which seems to point to Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island, he and his Stepfather Hank (Dwayne Johnston) travel to Palau to charter a boat. There they team up with helicopter pilot Gabato (Luis Guzman) and his daughter Kalani (Vanessa Hudgens) before crashing on the island. Trapped, they only have a few days to get off the island again before it sinks back into the sea.

I wasn’t expecting all that much from this movie as I’d seen the first Journey film. It was silly and gimmicky but fairly innocuous on the whole and the same holds true here, even though Journey 2 does fall down in a number of areas. Namely that the special effects are cheesy, the comic relief of Gabato is terrible, the love interest character is pointless and the broad strokes of the movie are pretty much the same as that of the first (e.g. find hidden area, hidden area is going to become inhospitable in X amount of time, get to Y before allotted time X expires in order to escape).

Where it pulled itself up a little however, was in the relationships between Sean, Hank and Sean’s grandfather Alexander (Michael Caine). It’s not high family drama or anything, but it gives some characterisation to all three men which helps to make them feel more realistic in a wildly unrealistic setting. It creates at least some level of investment in wanting to see these characters survive what is happening around them.

It’s nothing you are ever going to remember a couple of days after watching but there’s also nothing to annoy or enrage you about it should you chose to watch it. It evokes no strong emotions either way. 2/5

#337/#54 The Hunger Games

In the dystopic future, yearly hunger game are undertaken by 2 tributes from each of the 12 districts in which participants fight until only one remains. This year sees the struggles of District 12’s female tribute, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), as she tackles life in the games.

I hate when I’ve got to review a film like this. A film that by every definition is a good film but just doesn’t capture the spark to make it a great one. It’s easy to say bad things about a bad movie but it’s difficult to pinpoint what’s missing to make an acceptable one better than it should be. It’s also more often than not a film I’ve already read the book/series of before it made its way to the silver screen. I don’t know if it’s higher expectations or just familiarity with the story but it happened to Harry Potter, it happened to Lisbeth Salander and now it has happened to Katnis Everdeen.

The good, first off, is plentiful throughout the film. The music, cinematography and set design really work to capture the feel of poverty in the districts and the decadence of the capitol. Additionally specific actors such as Jennifer Lawerence, Stanley Tucci and Elizabeth Banks all fill their roles perfectly and others such as Woody Harrelson, Lenny Kravitz, Amandla Stenberg and Donald Sutherland, while not what I had pictured from the books, all do really well to make their roles fit them properly. All of the behinds the scenes stuff with the game keepers and President Snow (Sutherland) was also a welcome addition.

The bad, however, comes when they decided to cut things out or speed things up that were paramount in the book. I’m not talking little things like cutting the character of Madge out. That made sense to keep the narrative flow going, but things like having Katnis find water right away, or meeting, bonding with and then losing Rue in such rapid succession or all the cave scenes. It kept the gist of why all those things were important but it lost the emotional impact that came with them. It lost the oppressive feel that even the games were trying to kill Katnis right from the beginning with something as simple as withholding water.

Additionally, in a similar vein to Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander, Kantis does not vocalise anything. The majority of the context we get in the books is from her observations and inner thoughts so we lose a lot of this in the transition to the screen. They fixed this a little by adding the commentary by Tucci’s character but it still felt a bit like an abridged version of the story. All the same content just none of the context.

Lastly I didn’t like Josh Hutcherson as Peeta. I generally like him as an actor but he just felt pointless and out of his league acting along side Lawrence in this. I’ve never liked the character of Peeta but the first book was where he made the most sense to the hunger games storyline so you’d expect this film to be the one where he would establish his presence and it just doesn’t materialise here.

Overall I still enjoyed the movie, and I’m going to be checking out the further ones in the series, but there was a better version of this film that could have been made. 3/5

#227 The Kids Are All Right

Wanting to learn more about their sperm donor father (Mark Ruffalo), two teenage children (Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson) of a lesbian couple (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) make contact with him. This upsets the family dynamic and everyone involved has to learn where they now stand with one another.

Must…resist…urge…to…call…film…alright.

In all serious though that about sums up this film. It doesn’t impress in any real way and it follows its plot in much the way you expect it to from the outset. It has got a couple messages it wants to impart on the viewer which it pushes a little too heavily (seriously if this film was leaning any more to the left it would be carving a trench in the ground. It actually seems like it’s verging on parody in some places as a result of this.) and it does manage to have a couple of tender moments near the end of its run time but for the majority of the film it’s just good actors going through the motions.

I really don’t know what more to say about this one. It’s a little like Secretariat in that it’s super generic and about a pretty bland subject matter. The only thing which really got it any attention is that the story involves a gay couple instead of a straight one. While this is a progressive step forward in an industry where the majority of films are made for white males between 15 and 35, it’s just not made any more interesting by the fact that it’s lesbians having relationship problems over every other dramatic movie in which a straight couple have relationship problems. 2.5/5