Redux Month - Ratchet and Clank (movie)

Before we get to this film, a couple of quickfire revisions

I've said before I was probably too harsh on the live action Japanese Death Note films, at least they're not the Netflix film

My Harry Potter mini reviews: 5 and 6 in particular were short and lacking in detail, I would have done at least one of those for this month but then JK Rowling became controversial

Dude Where’s my Car: who you love is irrelevant and 2 transgender people can fall in love same as anyone else. My joke was inappropriate and I will have edited that review by the time this goes out. (If only to say transgender as opposed to transsexual – what the heck was I thinking?)

Star Wars: The Clone Wars movie – I rewatched it again recently and it’s terrible

Captain Sabretooth and the Treasure of the Lama Rama – apparently the white makeup is supposed to be some kind of status symbol (although at least one of the villains calls him pasty-faced) I should’ve looked into it more before writing that review, still not a good film though

I’m sure there are more problems and mistakes I should go over and maybe I’ll do another of these if I’m still doing this in 5 years’ time, but before now let’s look at Ratchet and Clank again.

Ratchet and Clank had a very encouraging teaser in its early development, maybe a little too early all things considered as it was an age before another trailer released, then the game news and that’s basically all there was until the film’s release. You have to wonder whether there was much confidence in the film taking it off, and it really didn’t.

Rainmaker were the animators for this project, which immediately raised alarm bells with me. Sony owns the Ratchet and Clank rights, and an animation studio that could’ve done the work. But they outsourced it to Rainmaker instead, implying little confidence in it from the start, then there’s the fact that Sony wouldn’t even distribute the movie under their own brand. It was distributed via Vertigo films by Lionsgate.

Rainmaker weren’t exactly greats in the genre as their only other theatrically released film was Escape to Planet Earth, a film that was not received well critically and floundered at the box office. Their niche was more in CG direct to video films and series such as ReBoot (they also did the Guardian Code, we’ll be back to that soon, don’t you worry)

Writing the film’s story is TJ Fixman, who had written the PS3-era games and the game tie-in to this, along with Gerry Swallow, writer of the Ice Age sequels and Kevin Monroe, who was also the film’s director. TJ Fixman apparently left the project before the writing process was complete but admits his fingerprints are ‘all over the film’.

So what went wrong? This film floundered hard, being lambasted by critics and ignored by audiences. I offered my theories in my original review (plug) so I’m just gonna stick with the story for this one.

Redux Month - Charlie's Angels Full Throttle

Oh boy, we’re back to this one. So, Redux month continues with Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle

I gave this quite a scathing review back in the day but has time changed my mind? Well in part, but to that in a moment. McG is back in the director’s chair and John August is back with the story, Cormac and Marianne Wibberly are now helping to write the screenplay, I Spy and The 6^th Day were their only credited films at this point.

Making $259.1m on a $120m budget meant the movie wasn’t as successful as the first, and with a 49% RT rating, it was less critically successful as well, what went wrong? Let’s take another look.

Redux Month - Charlie's Angels

Hey, don’t call me angel

So the Charlie’s Angels reboot came out in late 2019 to the fanfare of almost no-one, in part thanks to the godawful choice of song that accompanied the trailer, but we’re not talking about that one today it’s redux month

And we’re looking at the 2000 film, directed by McG, who since has directed such greats as This Means War and the sequel to this movie (who am I kidding?) and written by Ryan Rowe, whose bibliography looks more like a rap sheet, Ed Soloman, who wrote the Bill and Ted films, but also the Super Mario Bros movie and John August, at this point he’d written God, Go, and Titan AE, he went onto write the Tim Burton Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie and the live action Aladdin, make of that what you will.

The film made some money, $264m on a $93m budget, and received a positive 62% rotten tomatoes rating with critics, but audiences landed it a mere 45%, with the averages of both being around a 6.2/10. So, looking back on this movie, has my opinion changed?

Redux Month - Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters

We’re looking now at the second of the Percy Jackson film series and the one that would end up being the last of them. Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters

Though the leads are still familiar, much has changed around them. Thor Freudenthal (whose name will never stop being funny, when he’s directing a movie based around the Greek gods) has taken over directing and Marc Guggenheim is the new and still only writer of the film. Marc Guggenheim’s last and first project as a writer for film was Green Lantern, and we all know how much I love that film.

I’m a little more lenient to this book however, it has its flaws, it takes too much time explaining things anyone who read the last book already knew, but the story gets moving more quickly, and it isn’t all as melancholy and depressing.

Sadly though, in the spite of the change of talent, the result was much the same. A mixed reception and less money at the box office than its predecessor. Let’s take another look and see if we can work out why

Redux Month: Percy Jackson & the (Olympians: The) Lightning Thief

I took a look at the Percy Jackson movies side by side as a sequel baiting, concluding that whilst neither of them were good, Sea of Monsters marginally edged out The Lightning Thief as a better product. Now time to look at each of them as individual entities.

I have now read the first two Percy Jackson novels and… they were OK. It was a reasonably engaging tale and I like the idea of Greek Gods operating in the modern world but I felt like Percy got to see all the horror and calamity with none of the fun and joy. And this may have been intentional, true to Greek myth and whatnot, but was jarring to me as a reader. It kinda reminded me of the Spiderwick Chronicles (the film anyway, and not in context, but in tone). The Lightning Thief was the worst for this, as we continually saw that Percy was being blamed for disasters caused by the monster fights, being essentially branded a terrorist.

The writer for this first outing and yes, there’s only one, is Craig Titley. He did the not particularly good live action Scooby Doo movie, a couple of decent episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars and a few from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. So, you could argue this as a net positive, not seen Cheaper by the Dozen so can’t use that to judge but it’s never a great sign when you only have one writer, and no-one to reign him in.

Chris Columbus is in the director’s chair, just off of the first two Harry Potter movies, so at least he’s a guy with experience in this. The film made money but not to the same level as Harry Potter did and got a more decidedly mixed reception. Why? Let’s take a closer look.

Redux Month - Ender's Game

We continue redux month with another book-based failed franchise starter and one of my earliest reviews, Ender’s Game.

I’m not attempting to distance myself from previous review, I do still stand by a lot of what I said, I just thought that bringing in the book would add some more perspective this one. Orson Scott Card is not a great human being. Anti-gay activist, equating homosexuality to paedophilia, you can guess where this is going. I did not know all of this when I originally bought the DVD, it just looked interesting to me, so I decided to pick it up.

I have since got rid of it, but thankfully it was up on Netflix so I didn’t need to order another copy. The critical result is just above the margin for Fresh ratings (with 61% with critics and 65 with audiences) but the box office doomed this film and the franchise that could’ve followed.

Redux Month - Daredevil

“How do you kill a man without fear?”

What kind of dumb question is that? Being unafraid doesn’t make you bulletproof, immune to knives or poison or fire, it doesn’t make you able to breathe underwater, or be incapable of succumbing to injuries. You kill him the same way you kill anyone else.

Next up for redux month, we’re talking about Daredevil and I’ve got a confession to make, when I did my original Daredevil review, I’d never read a Daredevil comic, and it would be another 6 months before the Netflix show would come out and redefine Daredevil in my eyes (along with a lot of people’s). The purpose of the review was to defend the casting of Ben Affleck as Batman in the then upcoming Batman v Superman movie… which as you all worked out so well, our latest Batman is Edward Cullen from Twilight. I kid, Robert Pattinson’s a decent actor.

So what’s my new take on Daredevil. Oh boy is it bad, but it’s still not as bad as Elektra. I know, I’m full of hot takes here.

Redux Month - Stormbreaker (Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker)

It’s time to address some flaws, welcome to redux month

Through the month of March, I’m going to be taking another look at films I’ve previously reviewed, correcting any mistakes I’d noticed, and/or adding in some new perspective. And the first film I’m gonna be recovering is Stormbreaker.

This was one my earlier reviews (but not the earliest I’m covering) and it’s one I have some regrets over, I have now read the book and I think it’s fine, not one of my favourites, but I might check out the upcoming Alex Rider series they’re developing.

When I first reviewed this film, I concluded that over-marketing could be the reason for the film’s failure, it wasn’t, that was really naïve of me to say. Marketing certainly was a factor for this but the blame seems to land at the feet of everyone’s favourite company, the Weinstein company, who clearly didn’t like the film, gave it a trailer featuring more Ewan McGregor than there was in the film and didn’t bother giving it a wide release in the US, it went straight to DVD in other territories too, this may be the consequence of not having a big studio like Warner Bros. behind it like Harry Potter did.

Its reception probably didn’t help either, it holds a 35% Rotten Tomatoes rating and only a 53% audience score.

So, let’s take another look at Stormbreaker and see what else I missed.

Netflix Retrospective - Iron Fist Season 2 Episodes 9-10 - War Without End/A Duel of Iron

We are back for one last time with Iron Fist