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Wednesday, 27 August 2025

Review: Honey Don't!

Hitting our shores on a wave of mixed reviews out of the USA, Honey Don't! is the kind of film that definitely has problems if you're looking for them. It also has a fair bit going for it if you're willing to meet it at its own level - which, to be clear, is a pretty shallow level. But when it's a film about a lesbian PI investigating a case packed with wacky types you weren't seriously expecting "deep".

Honey O'Donohue (Margaret Qualley) is a love 'em and leave 'em California small town private investigator who feels bad that she never got back to a client in trouble before she (the client) died in a fairly suspicious car crash. So she decides to dig around, and uncovers a string of over-the-top types vaguely linked to a local preacher (Chris Evans) running a church that's big on bringing people to the lord via sex (with him).

Movies about private investigators have a long and proud tradition of not really making much sense. This barely hangs together, even when it throws in a few twists - Honey's niece (Talia Ryder) goes missing (or does she?), Honey strikes up a relationship with one cop (Aubrey Plaza) while brushing off another one (Charlie Day) - but eventually there's an answer of sorts.

This is a film where getting there is pretty much all the fun. A striking Qualley is largely the (not-so) straight man to a bunch of comedy types who are all playing it very broad but rarely stick around long enough to get annoying. Neither does the film at barely 90 minutes - big thanks to co-writer / director Ethan Coen (working with his wife Tricia Cooke) there. 

Oh yeah, it's directed by one half of the Coen brothers. If you're someone who's been worshipping the ground they walk on for the last few decades then a): good work forgetting films like The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty, and b): this probably feels like a pale reflection of past glories. 

While it's true this is operating in a register the Coens made their own without ever reaching the heights of their best work, that doesn't make it a failure. Again, it definitely has flaws. For one, Honey is surrounded by over-acting, which sometimes makes it hard to figure out which deaths are tragic and which ones are more like "guess that just happened".

For another, the plot never comes together to resolve much of anything, which possibly is intentional. Again, often the problem is tonal; some elements are built up but turn out to only be there so something else can happen, while more than once an inevitable development is either ignored or skipped over.

But Honey Don't! is a decent small town noir investing heavily in the idea that a bunch of steamy lesbian sex - or ogling, or even just banter - can make up for its flaws. Better films have skated by on less.

- Anthony Morris 

Thursday, 21 August 2025

Review: Relay


Sneaking in under the radar, Relay is the kind of small scale, procedure-based thriller that rarely makes it to the big screen these days. Which is a shame; it'd be nice to think there was room in cinemas for something more than big budget franchises and horror movies, even as the box office constantly says otherwise.

The premise is straightforward: if you are a whistleblower who changes your mind - you want to give the incriminating evidence back to the evil corporation and just get on with your life - then Ash (Riz Ahmed) is the intermediary who will keep you safe and handle the delicate negotiations. Not face to face, of course, as a big part of this movie is about laying out the extreme levels of secrecy he applies to his operations. 

For one, "relay" refers to the fact that all his phone calls go through an untraceable phone relay service for the deaf. They're not allowed to record or monitor the calls in any way shape or form, and he never has to speak - he types in the words, the relay service has someone speak them to the person on the other end. And his secrecy doesn't stop there.

This, we rapidly realise, is a good thing. His latest case involves a scientist (Lily James) who has changed her mind about spilling the beans regarding a dodgy strain of wheat. Only she's already being targeted by a squad led by Dawson (Sam Worthington), who want the info back and don't trust Ash in the slightest. 

What follows is a game of cat and mouse (think a low tech version of one of the good Jason Bourne movies) as Ash runs everyone ragged to put all the pieces in place without being identified, while Dawson and his team are constantly drawing ever closer to tearing off his (proverbial) mask.

There is slightly more going on here, but it's also the one area where the film isn't quite as smart as it thinks it is. Fortunately, the whole thing works as a procedural no matter what, and it's more a matter of how the tension is released (either all at once or over a longer period) than the film relying on a big reveal to work.

Out of the three main characters Worthington is clearly having fun as a stock standard highly competent badass, while Ahmed gets to slowly open up in a journey that's constantly engaging even if what's revealed is somewhat predictable. James as a fairly generic damsel in distress is possibly the least interesting of the three, though a close study of her character does reveal a few layers that spice things up a little as her bond with Ash grows.

Satisfying more as a step-by-step look at a bunch of smart people trying to outsmart each other than as a high octane thrill-ride, Relay is the kind of espionage drama that'll always find a receptive audience. Whether that audience is in cinemas or streaming remains to be seen: there's still time for audiences to have their say.

- Anthony Morris 

 

Thursday, 14 August 2025

Review: The Naked Gun


The problem with making a comedy that's more than "merely" a comedy is that pretty much anything is easier to do than comedy. Once you start down the path of making a comedy only, you know, the dramatic scenes are treated seriously, it's not long before you've got a half baked drama with a few limp gags scattered throughout. It takes creatives who take comedy seriously to make a film that's just trying to be funny from start to finish, which brings us to The Naked Gun.

A sequel of sorts to a much-loved and very silly 80s comedy franchise that's currently seen as a high water mark of a genre nobody really misses, this particular do-over has been a while coming. So much so that it initially was surfing a completely different wave, in the form of the brief feature-length comedy renaissance of Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, whose success with talking teddy bear movie Ted briefly had him as the saviour of big screen comedy.

Fortunately it took so long to put the puzzle pieces together that MacFarlane himself stepped back to merely produce, and while Liam Neeson (who'd worked with MacFarlane) stuck around as Frank Drebin Jr, new director Akiva Schaffer (Hot Rod) brought in his own writers to create this particular 85-odd minutes of non-stop comedy wrapped around a loose parody of police mysteries and action drama.

And "non-stop" is no exaggeration: that previously mentioned genre that nobody misses is the one where the jokes come thick, fast, and in pretty much every form available. In early examples like Airplane! (Flying High! in Australia), Top Secret! and The Naked Gun, the mix of genre parody and whatever the creative team thought would get a laugh often struck comedy gold; by 2008's Meet The Spartans, nobody was having much of a good time.

The Naked Gun (2025) works mostly because the jokes are funny, both in isolation and taken together. They're usually so silly they'd float away if not for the weight of the gruff performance from Neeson and the... not exactly gravitas or sense of legacy, but in that ballpark... that the original Naked Gun has gained over the years. 

Forty years on, the original is seen as a real movie. It's something to live up to, and the fact this clearly tries to do so - even if the way it tries is through a lot of stupid-smart jokes - makes it feel like a real movie in a way that, say, most of Adam Sandler's efforts for Netflix do not.

So jokes so stupid they come out the other side and seem almost smart: this has plenty of them. Not all of them work, and sometimes you can see where the jokes that didn't work were cut, but mostly this gets the laughs it goes for - and it goes for a lot. Pamela Anderson is the surprise MVP here, and it turns out two leads who are good at playing it serious in a crazy world are all you need.

The Naked Gun knows where it's going and it does everything it can to make sure it gets there; would that more of Hollywood's more serious products could manage that.

- Anthony Morris 

Saturday, 9 August 2025

Review: Weapons


More than a lot of other genres, horror movies don't want you to look back. The point is to scare you in the moment; if that means that later on you realise the scare didn't really make sense, well, here's a new scare, don't think about this one too much either.

Weapons is a story told via a number of characters whose paths overlap. Over the course of their stories, the pace slowly but steadily ramps up: the first couple of chapters (it's broken into a series of roughly 20-minute segments, each open opening with the name of the character we'll be following) take place over days, then hours, with the final one pretty much running in real time.

So as the bigger picture becomes clear, there's less time to take it all in. Which on one level makes this a lot of fun to watch; the stakes get higher, the tension builds, characters are rushing towards situations they don't understand - and we barely know more than they do, just that they're heading into worse trouble than they realise - and the whole thing reaches a crescendo that's both extremely satisfying and pretty ghastly if you think about it.

As for what it's actually about, beyond the basic set up - in small town USA, at 2.17am, seventeen primary schoolkids from the same class got up, ran out of their homes, and vanished - the less you know the better. 

The community is outraged, with much of their ire falling on the children's teacher (Julia Garner), who has a few personal flaws of her own. Distraught father Archer (Josh Brolin) is conducting his own investigation, while inept cop Paul (Aiden Ehrenreich), local junkie James (Austin Abrams), and the only child from the class who didn't vanish (Cary Christopher) and his great-aunt (Amy Madigan) also come into focus.

There's a lot of possible touchstones here. Small town, young children gives a Stranger Things vibe; throw in the big cast and the overlapping chapters and there's echos of Stephen King. Likewise, early on this is happy to feint in a lot of directions as far as possible meanings; mob violence, a metaphor for school shootings, American citizens desperate to latch onto any explanation for the horrors around them. Take your pick.

Even the distinctive arms out run of the missing children has multiple possible meanings, from historical images to kids pretending to be aeroplanes, but writer/ director Zach Cregger is much more interested in making gestures than building anything solid out of them. It's a film of surfaces, gesturing towards deeper meanings then discarding them.

What really matters here isn't so much the explanation (though there is one) as the journey. There's plenty of scares and a growing sense of unease; there's also a surprising amount of comedy, both to relieve the tension and because some of what's going on really is legitimately funny. 

Weapons is a twisty, satisfyingly startling ride that relentlessly pushes you onward - and if later on you're left thinking "hang on a second", you'll probably be too worried about what's behind you in the back seat of your car to look back.

- Anthony Morris 

Friday, 25 July 2025

Review: The Fantastic Four: First Steps


A consistently entertaining, back-to-basics superhero tale shouldn't be quite so surprising in 2025. But after almost two decades of ever-increasing bloat, cutting things back to the core - likable characters with interesting abilities using them to battle a clear villain - feels like a radical move. All of which is to say, The Fantastic Four: First Steps basically re-invents the wheel, which is handy because Marvel's been dragging their heels for a while now.

Over in Earth 828 - a nice salute to Fantastic Four co-creator Jack Kirby that we probably wouldn't have if Stan Lee was still alive - the 60s are going strong, thanks in part to the super-powered occupants of New York's Baxter Building. A few years back Reed Richards / Mr Fantastic (Pedro Pascal) Sue Storm / The Invisible Woman (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm / The Human Torch (Joseph Quinn) and Ben Grimm / The Thing (Ebon Moss-Backrach) went up into space, got pelted by cosmic rays, and came home celebrities with a side hustle in fighting monsters and averting disasters.

All that backstory is covered in a TV special; the new news here is that Sue is pregnant. A concerned Reed (after all, who knows what cosmic ray exposure might lead to?) is using his big brain to come up with devices to constantly monitor her pregnancy, while the ever-cooking Thing (who refuses to say his catchphrase, claiming it was made up for a cartoon) and the always-cocky Johnny work on being the best uncles ever. Oh, and an alien herald (Julia Garner) on a flying surfboard turns up and tells the people of Earth they're all about to die.

The Fantastic Four swing into action, tracking her back to a planet in deep space. Maybe not the best place for a pregnant woman to head off to - but they're a team, they're pledged to protect Earth, and after a journey that sells space travel as a bit more complicated and exciting than these movies usually manage, they reach their destination... just in time to see it eaten by the planet-devouring being known as Galactus (Ralph Ineson).

There's a tonal shift in director Matt Shakman's film from this point - what had previously been something of a light romp gets a bit more serious - but that's to be expected when the fate of Earth is at stake. The lack of other superheroes means we get a lot more of a look at the FF's schemes to save everybody (in a traditional Marvel movie, this part would be replaced by 40 minutes of recruiting other heroes), alongside some reminders that having near-certain death hanging over the planet would be a bit of a downer for a lot of people.

Another beneficiary of the straightforward story are our four leads, all of whom get enough room to exist as actual characters beyond their roles in the plot. The connection between the grounded Sue and the super-smart but a little distant Reed feels real, while the gruff but good-hearted Ben and the (slightly) hot-headed but always focused Johnny are a solid double act while each getting their own moments to be endearingly human.

This isn't flawless - some of the CGI could have used a few more weeks polish - and while the story's simplicity has its charms it's also lacking a bit of the grit that made the best Marvel films work. It's a reminder that there's a good reason why the four previous attempts at a Fantastic Four movie faltered: more than many superheroes, these are good-hearted characters aimed at children, and they need a lot of sincerity (provided here by the idealised '60s backdrop) if they're going to click.

How they'll fare in the wider MCU remains to be seen - though it'll be seen soon enough, with the FF locked into the upcoming Avengers movie. With their biggest nemesis confirmed as the bad guy there, they'll have their work cut out for them: the good news is, First Steps has them off to a great start.

- Anthony Morris 

 

Saturday, 19 July 2025

Review: I Know What You Did Last Summer


Twenty five years ago, the sleepy fishing town of Southport was rocked by a series of brutal murders triggered by a bunch of teens trying to bury their involvement in a fatal car wreck. The killings were promptly covered up by the local real estate mogul, who realised that a resort town with a hook-handed body count might be a tough sell. And where did it get them? A quarter century later and it's happening all over again.

Okay, there are a few minor differences. This time the cover-up crew are in their early 20s; they're also much less directly responsible for the car crash, which does take away a lot of the "hey, maybe they deserve it" energy the first film had. 

And this is a direct follow on from the first film, with the characters from the original played by Jennifer Love Hewitt (now a college professor) and Freddie Prinze Jr (now a local bar owner) both increasingly involved with events. And yet even now, with their former glories far behind them, they still have way more screen presence than the younger cast - apart from maybe angsty Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), who is clearly being set up to be the final girl. Rich comedy relief Danica (Madelyn Cline), not so much.

But for the most part we've been here before. Which isn't automatically a bad thing, and for much of the run time this ticks along nicely as a not-too-serious slasher film. As such, the kills aren't great, and the film isn't always sure just how serious we should take them - some are a bit grim, most are like "well, that would suck" - but at least the nautical theme from the first film is maintained for absolutely no reason (okay, there are still a few fishing boats in the harbor).

As a whodunnit it works a little better, thanks in part to an orderly kill list: first to go are people with no real connection to the car crash death, then as the killings get closer to the core group you start to notice that hey, we never see this character or that character around during the deaths and then whoops, they're dead too. 

Of course, it all stops making any real sense long before the drawn out conclusion - which also features a development that goes against all logic and common sense once yet another shock twist reveal happens in the very next scene. But if you wanted a movie that made sense you wouldn't be here in the first place. 

Utterly inessential viewing for anyone who's not a massive fan of the original and yet still a passably enjoyable time-waster taken on its merits,  I Know What You Did Last Summer is a reminder that sometimes last summer - or summer 25 years ago - is better left in the past. Even if it does involve a bisexual hook-up in an airport bathroom with a true-crime podcaster.

- Anthony Morris 

Wednesday, 9 July 2025

Review: Superman


Superman has always stood a little apart from the flood of big-screen costumed superheroes - or metahumans, as this film likes to call them. Batman is just a guy in a costume, who can trace his ancestry back to earlier pulp characters like Zorro or The Shadow; Spider-Man and most of the Marvel heroes that followed were built as much around a flaw as a power. Superman got there first, and that gave him more gravity, even if you did believe a man could fly.

But now, as they say, all that's changed. The Superman (David Corenswet) we meet mid-battle in Superman is one more costumed hero in a world full of them - and unlike the Snyderverse's Justice League, the other superheroes here are comic book deep cuts, not household names. Superman still soars, but the gloss has come off a little: he's a regular guy, trying to do the best he can in a world where he doesn't stand out quite as much as you might expect.

The story here bounces around a fair bit while the main thrust remains constant: Lex Luthor (Nicolas Hoult) really does not like Superman. Stopping a recent small-scale war without getting government approval has Superman on shaky ground PR wise, while Luthor and his super-powered henchman The Engineer (Maria Gabriela de Faria) and Ultraman (some guy in a mask) are off looting Superman's Fortress of Solitude and trashing his robot helpers in the process. Which is mostly just finishing the job Krypto started, because that dog (who comes in handy more than once) does not have good manners.

A Superman movie comes with a lot of expectations, and this does a decent job of ticking the familiar boxes. Despite being set three years after Superman announced himself to the world, his origin - as seen in the last two Superman movies - still manages to get a fair amount of air time thanks to a twist in the message his Kryptonian parents sent along with him to Earth, along with a late-stage recovery session at the Kent's family farm. 

Likewise, the romance between Clark and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), now in its third month and with some bumps still to be ironed out, gets a few scenes without ever really feeling like the heart of the film despite Brosnahan's strong performance. And yes, all the Daily Planet crew do make an appearance, though it's ladies man Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) who gets a surprisingly large role in proceedings.

It's all stuff we want to see and writer / director James Gunn does a good job of fitting it all in (even though it doesn't always feel central to the plot) by making this a film that's as much about showcasing Superman as it is about telling a story. The gamble here is that Superman himself is interesting enough to carry a film whatever he's up to, and for the most part it comes off.

This focus on character over plot does give Superman a slightly sprawling feel, as pretty much everyone gets their moment in the (yellow) sun - including the members of the "Justice Gang" (operating out of the cartoon Super-Friends Hall of Justice, though they haven't fully moved in yet). Blunt force Green Lantern Guy Gardener (Nathan Fillion), the equally bludgeoning Hawkgirl (Isabella Merced), and scene-stealing brains of the outfit Mr Terrific (Edi Gathegi) pull focus in the back half as Superman is brought low - so he can come back in the final act, of course.

Superman is usually a solo act when it comes to super-action - we haven't even mentioned Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan), who can change his body into any element and that should probably set alarm bells ringing - so having him share screen time with a bunch of second stringers does dilute his impact a little. Again, Gunn steers into that, giving us a Superman who's a bit dorky and a little square (his taste in music is not great), the kind of hero who sees asking for help when it's needed as a strength rather than a flaw.

(also, it seems his Clark Kent disguise now involves "hypno glasses" to throw everyone off) 

Balancing that, Luthor gets plenty of screentime to evil up the place, freely admitting to being envious of Superman for distracting humanity from his (human) greatness while swinging between moments of extreme supervilliany and all-too-grounded brutality. Plus his evil scheme is, on one minor level, something of a callback to the first Superman film: seems Lex just can't resist a real estate deal.

This doesn't take itself anywhere near as seriously as the recent Snyderverse films, which isn't surprising: there are films about death camps that don't take themselves as seriously as Man of Steel. It's a charming, highly entertaining film that isn't afraid to keep things light (and light-hearted); the mood here is pure comic book, throwing out concepts and characters at a rapid pace with a breezy vibe underlying it all. 

Well, a breezy vibe and an anti-proton river from a pocket universe that flows to a black hole that might destroy the Earth, but that's all in a day's work for your friendly neighbourhood Superman.

- Anthony Morris