Least promising Sequel/Remake/Franchise Flick of 2022

anyway, maverick: totally fine! really thrilling sports movie where the sport is murdering people for the government in a big fast plane. pretty much nothing gay about it except for the brief instances where cruise mourns his long-departed life partner goose, but at least true to form the straight romantic scenes are hilariously parodic and boring. (love connelly though, her presence in any movie is... comforting(?) to me. need to bring this up to my therapist.) and nowhere near as beautiful and palatial as the first but it functions much better as a blockbuster

it is also awful evil propaganda and that only really settled in when they're celebrating their kills at the end :) i like a lot of reagan-era "the cities are swarming with drug-addicted mutants and the only person who can save you is a cop who doesn't play by the rules and his enormous gun" conservative propaganda (and of course i also love the cia propaganda franchise also starring my beloved tom gun) that feels like it transpires in a hilarious fantasy universe only vaguely attached to ours, but i can perceive the real world consequences of the collected tom guns a lot more when i actually watch them. i already know i would hate to fly a really fast plane with a gun attached to it, but i will say it made flying a really fast plane seem so attractive, aside from all the scenes of people's faces bending backward because of the all of the fuckin gs they're absorbing (which made me think... oh, this is technology morphing the human body into new shapes... and my brain autospliced the opening airplane hangar scene from cronenberg's crash into the film)

When you got movies like Tom Cruise in them, you can't lose

tom gun drops to his knees to make out with the zip in ice kilmer's stomach, tony scott returns from the dead to light the strands of saliva between tongue cruise and val's cancer

excellent review Brad!

i also enjoyed it more than I expected... it's very well constructed as a war-sport-mission-popcorn movie. agreed that the romance doesn't quite sing, but those scenes still has more in them for me than all the stuff with the generic new recruits. although i guess it worked for some --- when the shithead guy steps up and does something useful, a mild round of applause went up from somewhere in the auditorium. my partner whispered to me, baffled: "who's a fan of Hangman?!

but the real step down from the original was aesthetic... Scott and the score gave it this amazing hazy overpowering quality that's really been smoothed out here.

also i couldn't get past how stupid their mission was. really? there's no other way to do this? what if you sent in, idk, a slightly higher number of planes. oh right, only the enemy has the super advanced unstoppable Fifth Generation Fighters. clearly we've starved the Pentagon for too long.

put me down as someone for whom the new recruits worked, but that's prob because they're like the crew of a slasher film, all paper-thin archetypes

I kept thinking of the Futurama line about "a dedicated young man, with no characteristics."

lol

this could easily become "most promising" if they do the right thing and cast danny devito as the title character

A live-action film is in development based on the classic arcade game with an endless appetite, #PacMan https://t.co/Z6nBd7qgmD pic.twitter.com/aG98LUtTym

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) August 8, 2022

predator 5 best predator

Y’all have almost convinced me to watch it.

All the manbabies on Twitter whining about the ending has convinced me to watch it.

I thought Prey was...well, I didn't much like the original Predator to begin with (never saw any of the other sequels). Liked the girl, liked the dog, liked the setting, but I found a lot of the action hard to follow, to the extent that I had to rewind a couple of scenes to be sure what was going on. I'm happy that people are happy, though.

it definitely feels like it's being overrated just for not being bad. it isn't bad, but it isn't particularly good either. acting was fine, the effects were pretty good, i didn't have a problem with the action, but there was nothing in particular in it that excited me or seemed especially interesting.

i do agree that i enjoyed it more than the o.g. Predator, which i rewatched recently and is a very unpleasant movie

the animal disembowelment in Prey i found extremely unpleasant. was going to watch it with the boys but the 10 yo loves animals of all kinds and i think would be pretty upset by it

that said it looks absolutely amazing on a good tv (brag brag)

Today in S/R/F news…

"Disney+ added that the new series, TWO GIANT GORILLAS FUCKING, will most likely reside behind the age-restriction barriers on the streaming service." https://t.co/oX3GVdcnIx

— DrewMcWeeny (@DrewMcWeeny) August 23, 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imn_gHwvUmc

"fletch, confess" with jon hamm as fletch

preview is promising? feels like they're trying to cash in on "knives out" kinda but a few lines made me chuckle

sorry "confess, fletch"

I...kinda want to see that.

The novel (and the whole Fletch series) are drier and smarter than the Chevy Chase movie suggests. And solid plots. Hamm seems like a great choice.

I read three or four of the novels as a teenager, around the time the movie came out. They were good; I wonder if they'd stand up now.

I seen Confess, Fletch this week and it was dreadful. Enough very good or competent people involved to wonder why it fell so flat.

i thought it was pretty ok! i lol’d throughout, maybe too loudly on the plane. i will not remember a thing about it by tomorrow

The actual mystery plot itself was fine but 98% of the jokes just died horribly. It wasn't even that they were terrible jokes but something about the delivery felt really off. One of the worst films I've seen in a while.

Not gonna go to bat very hard for it but my experience was more like Brad's: amusing and diverting enough, and I lolled several times. I'd watch another sequel, though I have doubts this was successful enough to make another

loved the rookie detective getting constantly outfletched by fletch

Not as good as a Fletch book, but a good modern adaptation of a Fletch book. Would happily watch two a year.