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 

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 

 

Review: Jurassic World Rebirth

What if, after the massive success of Jaws, the only shark movies ever made were sequels to Jaws? Every single movie about a shark was about a shark threatening a small coastal town, no exceptions? Good thing that never happened - sharks are such great movie monsters, it'd be a real shame if they were endlessly corralled into the same handful of scenarios over and over and over again.

On an unrelated topic, Jurassic World: Rebirth is the seventh in the Jurassic Park / World series, and after the last film brought pretty much everyone back for a farewell that was... better than some of the other films in the series... this one strikes out for all new territory. Only joking, it's basically the same movie as at least two of the other ones.

After being a world-spanning threat in previous films, revived dinosaurs have suddenly realised that they're not built for Earth's modern climate and have died off everywhere but a narrow band around the equator - one uninhabited island that was formerly used as a research lab in particular. Just because everyone who goes there dies doesn't mean it's not worth a visit, especially when "worth" is measured in billions because once again dinosaurs hold the key to a world-changing medical breakthrough.

So shady rich dude Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) has hired one mercenary (Scarlett Johansson) and one dinosaur expert (Jonathan Bailey) to in turn hire some disposable sidekicks to help them take blood samples from three different kinds of very big dinosaurs - a flying one, a swimming one, and one just walking around.

Meanwhile, cool dad Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is taking his family on a yacht trip across the Atlantic, just in time for them to get crashed into by an ocean-going dinosaur. Older daughter Teresa (Luna Blaise), her stoner boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono), and younger daughter Isabella (Audrina Miranda) cling onto the wreck with a new-found dislike of dinosaurs, only to be rescued by the one boat where the crew think going to Dino Death Island is a good idea.

As you might have predicted if you've ever seen any of the previous movies in the series, things do not go to plan and not everyone survives to be wrecked on the island. Those that do are split into two groups - the family, and the professionals - who alternate mildly scary encounters with the wildlife while trying to make it to the abandoned research base where they can either be rescued or eaten by a demonic genetic freak dinosaur we first saw in the opening scene.

To be fair, just because the overall story is a blatant retread of what has gone before doesn't automatically make this a bad film. Director Gareth Edwards (Monsters, Godzilla, The Creator) serves up a number of thrilling sequences and even a few moments of genuine awe, while the script (from David Koepp, back after scripting Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park: The Lost World) does at least drop Isabella into numerous psychologically scarring situations - so much so that her only path back to sanity turns out to be adopting a cute (and confirmed plant-eating) dinosaur.

Friend, playing the superficially charming but eventually amoral business executive that's been a staple of these kind of films since Aliens, does a good job of portraying his character's arc from "maybe he's not so bad" to "hurry up and fall into a dinosaur's gaping maw", while Johansson and Bailey's charisma helps distract from the fact they're basically playing action figures in a child's backyard game. Everyone else is fair game for the dinos, though fewer people end up eaten than you might have expected. 

Being aimed at a slightly younger audience than your average blockbuster usually puts the Jurassic films at a disadvantage, but by sticking to the basics and over-delivering on them this one manages to be both serviceably entertaining and largely forgettable. And if your child is the kind of dinosaur expert who'll complain that the movie versions aren't realistic (where are the feathers?), don't worry - we're told early on that the dinos on and around the island are "genetically modified", so all bets are off.

If nothing else, this does feature an amazing Final Destination-style opening sequence where a dropped Snickers wrapper single-handedly destroys a billion-dollar lab and leads directly to at least one person being eaten alive. Just like life, death finds a way.

-Anthony Morris