Category: Action

The Northman

Rated: MA15+The Northman

Directed by: Robert Eggers

Written by: Sjón, Robert Eggers

Produced by: Mark Huffam, Lars Knudsen, Robert Eggers, Alexander Skarsgård, Arnon Milchan

Starring: Alexander Skarsgård, Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe and Björk.

‘We thirst for vengeance but cannot escape our fate.’

The Northman is set in a time when the gods are worshiped with blood and villages are plundered, the people chattel, either killed or taken as slaves.

Only the strong ones survive the pillaging.  And if they live to arrive at their next destination, most wish they’d died in their homes.

The film opens with stencil against the grey imagery of ash billowing, belching from a volcano.  It’s a brutal black and white world until a child, young prince Amleth (Oscar Novak) calls out: his father, King Auvand (Ethan Hawke) has returned home.

The King and Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman) reunite, but not for long.

After King Auvand is betrayed and killed by his half-brother, Feng (Claes Bang), Amleth escapes, swearing to avenge his father and to free his mother.

The film runs in chapters so Amleth grows, becoming a wolf (Alexander Skarsgård).  Now he’s the brute, pillaging villages and talking slaves.  Until he’s reminded by a Seeress (Björk) of his promise of vengeance.

There’s a touch of magic in the story telling by Robert Eggers, with expansive scenes of Nordic grasslands, black sand with running rivers and the quiet of snowflakes falling.  The constant play of colour sets the mood of the film, with the black and white, the stark, to show the harsh fight for survival, to the red of fire, to a rebirth of green and new life.

The thread of the gods runs through the film like swords run through guts and throats and already cut-off noses; the Valkyrie rides a white horse into the heavens and the white-haired Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), whom Amleth is destined to meet, can talk to the earth and evoke the wind.

The story’s about fate and the gods and family, betrayal and survival.

There’s a flair of the dramatic that needed strong performances to hold the push of violence and drama and magic.  And Eggers achieved his vision – Kidman and Skarsgård particular highlights, with Willem Dafoe made for the role of Heimir the Fool – who’s, ‘wise enough to be the fool.’

The dramatic scenes have flair but are played with just enough restraint to add the right gravitas to the dialogue.

The violence too was intense but held back enough so as not to be disgusting but to allow a harsh reality.

Overall the best way I can describe, The Northman is a film of vengeance that is both brutal and beautiful.

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Rated: MA15+Everything Everywhere All At Once

Directed by: Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert)

Produced by: Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, Joe Russo, Anthony Russo, Jonathan Wang, Mike Larocca

Starring: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jenny Slate, Harry Shum Jr., with James Hong and Jamie Lee Curtis.

‘No time to wait’.

Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) and Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan) own and run a laundry they live above, in a small apartment with their daughter, Eleanor (Stephanie Hsu) and elderly father (James Hong).

Evelyn sits at the kitchen table, sifting through paperwork.  It’s time to submit their taxes.

A mundane existence.  But seen like life viewed through a mirror.  So even at the beginning, the film feels otherworldly.

That feeling builds as the film circles around again and again, so the sign of a bagel becomes significant, a fanny pack with a fluffy pig hanging as an ornament becomes a weapon, only to reappear later as a tattoo.  Or the mispronunciation of the title of a movie, Racoontouille (instead of, Ratatouille) becomes a reality.

The thought put into the making of this film is seen in the detail of creating this infinite multi-universe where the characters jump from one dimension to the other.  ‘Verse jumping’ gives them the ability of their other self in the another dimension.  So, need martial arts?  Verse jump to a universe where your self has that skill.  All it takes is a particular act, a touch of an earpiece and you’re set.

The particular required act to verse jump gets bizarre and hilarious, as do some of the other selves in other universes.

And the dynamics of the characters fold back again and again with a constant, sometimes gentle humour – a customer’s bag of laundry kept upstairs in the apartment, ‘I think the clothes are happier there’ – and sometimes delightfully twisted humour (sausages for fingers anyone?), weaved all the way through the storyline.

Even the interchange of language from English to Chinese adds to the blurring as Waymond arrives in this universe to take the body of Evelyn’s husband in the current universe to tell her that she’s the only one who can save the multiverse from the evil Toboki (Stephanie Hsu).  All the while tax auditor (Jamie Lee Curtis) is telling Evelyn that there can’t be anything more important than what’s she’s telling her about her current taxes, right now.  And this coming from an award-winning auditor – the phallic trophies on proud display.

I have to say, Jamie Lee Curtis is just pure gold as this tax auditor character.  Absolutely brilliant casting and performance.  Hilarious.

The whole cast is amazing with Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn in what looks like herself as an actress blended into the multiverse story.

There’s some far-reaching ideas here with the title of the movie just so apt.

And added to the Kung Fu fighting and humour there’s also a good foundation to the family drama so I had a good giggle, got a little teary, and was pleasantly surprised by edgy concepts held together with the use of chapters to give the movie structure.

I don’t want to give too much away because there will be plenty of buzz about this film and if you’re reading this review, you’re more than likely going to go watch it and I highly recommend it: go watch it.

Ambulance

Rated: MA15+Ambulance

Directed by: Michael Bay

Produced by: Michael Bay, Bradley J. Fischer, James Vanderbilt, William Sherak, Ian Bryce

Screenplay by: Chris Fedak, based on the original story and screenplay for the 2005 Danish film Ambulancen by Laurits Munch-Petersen and Lars Andreas Pederen

Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eiza González.

‘We’re a locomotive, we don’t stop.’

Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his brother Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) are escaping a bank robbery gone wrong in an ambulance.

They have two hostages, an EMT (Eiza González) and a shot cop needing emergency surgery.

It’s a Michael Bay action movie.

And I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way.

But some of the storyline, like the emergency surgery conducted by Cam the EMT in the back of the ambulance with instruction via Face Chat from surgeons taking a break from playing golf, pushed the storyline to the ridiculous making the cast have to work really hard to make the film believable enough to be watchable.

Yes, it’s a classic action film, with some awkward humour that rarely hit the mark, and yet being a classic action the light-hearted crazy from bad-brother Danny complimented the high-speed chases as the two brother are chased across LA by choppers and souped-up cop cars all to a soundtrack that just kept revving faster and faster.

It’s a quintessential LA setting with graffiti, and rubbish-strewn streets; the city lights and mesmerising, layered highways.  Ambulance is about two brothers growing up in LA, one who follows in his father’s footsteps, a well-known robber with a reputation of being psychotic, the other brother choosing a different life, to become a marine.

So there’s a back-story to the brothers’ relationship that keeps up the drama; Will doing right but right doesn’t pay for his wife’s desperately needed surgery.  So when he asks his wayward brother for money, it’s a matter of Will having to help him pull off a $32 million bank heist to get it.

And Danny can be very convincing.

Then there’s the EMT Cam – she can keep anyone alive for 20 minutes, but no one wants to be her partner.

One of the highlights of the film is Cam mystified seeing the two brothers singing the 80s classic, Sailing, while trying to relax mid-escape.

There’s a lot of tongue-in-cheek humour mixed with flashbacks to childhood montages with emotive music that kinda worked.  But what really worked in this film was the awe-inspiring camerawork that had the action spinning around to fly straight up into the air.

Really, the car chases and explosions are next level.

So medical procedures, high speed car chases and strange humour that had me scratching my head, like – ‘what did you do to my legs?!’ asks one robber after his legs are twisted the wrong way after being run over.

But overall, Ambulance is worth a watch just for those high-speed action shots.

The Bad Guys

Rated: PGThe Bad Guys

Directed by: Pierre Perifel

Based on: The Scholastic book series by Aaron Blabey

Produced by: Damon Ross and Rebecca Huntley

Executive Producers: Aaron Blabey, Etan Cohen and Patrick Hughes

Starring: Sam Rockwell, Marc Maron, Craig Robinson, Anthony Ramos, Awkwafina, Richard Ayoade, Zazie Beetz, Lilly Singh and Alex Borstein.

‘We may be bad but we’re so good at it.’  Meet, The Big Bad Wolf (Sam Rockwell).

Mr. Wolf is part of The Bad Guys – a gang of villains who just love being bad and stealing stuff.

There’s Mr. Snake (Marc Maron): a master like Houdini at opening a safe… without hands…

Ms. Tarantula (Awkwafina), AKA Wizz: an eight-legged hacker;

Mr. Shark (Craig Robinson): a master of disguise, ‘I’m a destruction worker.’

And Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos) – he’s crazy and farts when nervous.

Natural selection has handed The Bad Guys the card of being feared – everyone’s terrified of them, so why not be bad?!

When Governor Foxington (Zazie Beetz) calls the gang out on TV as being sad and needing to fill a hole in their being with money which is never going to work because they just want to be loved… Mr. Wolf sees red and decides it’s time to steal the ultimate bad guy prize: The Golden Dolphin.  A trophy given to the one citizen who’s done the most good.

Meet: Professor Marmalade (Richard Ayoade).  A guinea pig and therefore nicknamed, ‘Pig’.  He’s Mr. Snakes favourite food.

The storyline is setup as a heist movie for kids.  And not just because of the animation (DreamWorks excelling again with their detail in fur). But because of all the lame dad jokes.

‘You’re good at this.’

‘I’m kind of a natural.  Learned mostly from YouTube.’

There are some predictable twists in the plot with underlying main message of there’s ‘a flower of goodness in everyone, just waiting to blossom’.

But the tone of the film as a caper, with split screens and jaunty soundtrack, reminiscent of an Ocean’s movie, felt twee.

I know, a kid’s movie.  But the, ‘One of these days their luck is gonna run out,’ and the meteor falling to earth that Pig/Prof sees as a heart, naw, yet The Bad Guys see as a butt… Well, that actually was pretty funny.

And the, naw does get turned on its head.

It just wasn’t surprising.

The attempt of being edgy and diabolical made the film less edgy.

I liked the characters and the fact, Mr. Wolf can taste the air and hear colour.  But the lines of the characters didn’t always land making, The Bad Guys an OK watch but nothing over exciting.

Blacklight

Rated: MBlacklight

Directed by: Mark Williams

Written by: Nick May & Mark Williams

Produced by: Mark Williams, Paul Currie, Myles Nestel, Aleve Loh, Coco Ma

Starring: Liam Neeson, Aidan Quinn, Taylor John Smith, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Andrew Shaw, Zac Lemons, Claire Van Der Boom, Gabriella Sengos, Tim Draxl, Yael Stone, Georgia Flood, Caroline Brazier, Melanie Jarnsen.

‘Have I been doing the right thing?’ wonders, off-the-books fixer, Travis Block (Liam Neeson).

He’s the one head of the FBI, Bill Robinson (Aidan Quinn) turns to when deep cover agents get lost or worse, found out.

So when fellow agent Dusty Crane (Taylor John Smith) is found in his car full of pills and booze, leaving in his wake four cops who try and fail to take him down… Block is called to bring him in.

But instead of bringing Dusty back to the Bureau, Block discovers Dusty was on his way to meet Mira (Emmy Raver-Lampman).  A journalist.  He has a story to tell.  A story that will force Block to question what he’s been doing with his life.

Blacklight opens to a protest led by politician, Sofia Flores (Melanie Jarnsen); her speech including emotive statements like:

Financial greed

Domestic terrorism

Equal pay for everyone

We have something say!

Cut to the background of American flags flying in the breeze.

I admit I was cringing with the dramatic build of drums and high-hat flourishes.

Then enters Block.  He taps his second finger: 1-2-3.  Waiting for things to explode.

Blacklight is a classic style action movie with double take camera shots to increase that feeling of adrenaline and then missing takes to show a fragmented mind.

Then there’s the drama of Block wanting out: ‘There is no out for you.’

He wants a second chance at life and to spend more time with his granddaughter.

But his hospital working daughter doesn’t think he’s up to it: ‘Natalie doesn’t need a fixer like you.’

He wants out, they won’t let him.  His family don’t trust him because of his past…  The formula is a familiar one.  Very familiar.

Which is not always a bad thing.

But those camera double takes started to cloy after the first half hour.  As did the statements like, ‘The American people need to know the truth.’

It wasn’t all bad.  There is… action.  And a few twists.

And Neeson brings it, as always, with his brutish sincerity.

It just feels like a movie I’ve seen a dozen times before.

Watchable, then forgettable.

Moonfall

Rated: MMoonfall

Directed by: Roland Emmerich

Screenplay Written by: Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser, Spenser Cohen

Produced by: Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser

Starring: Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, Donald Sutherland, Michael Peña.

‘We’re not prepared for this.’

Part disaster movie, part sci-fi, comedy and drama, Moonfall begins its journey in space.  Where an anomaly throws a routine repair mission into a tragedy.

Jocinda (Halle Berry), AKA space wife loses her memory.  And space hero Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) loses everything.

After the tragedy is chalked up to human error, back on earth, Harper is now a fallen hero.

Fast forward ten years and something’s not right.

The moon is out of orbit and the first one to realise is megastructure conspiracist, K. C. Houseman (John Bradley).

But no one will listen.

‘Make them listen,’ says his mum.

So he does.

Being a Roland Emmerich film (think, Independence Day (1996), The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and 2012 (2012)), I expected a big budget disaster movie, and as already introduced, Moonfall is part disaster, part everything else.

Some notes hit, like the chuckles evoked from conspiracist, I-lost-two-mops, Houseman (you’ll recognise John Bradley as Sam in, Game of Thrones).  And some notes didn’t with the suspense lost in the drama of Jocinda and her ex, military man, Doug Davidson (Eme Ikwuakor) and bad-boy son, Sonny (Charlie Plummer).  And what I think was supposed to be an exchange student (?) Michelle (Kelly Yu).

I got a little lost down some rabbit holes.

But there’s a good foundation with a strong performance from Patrick Wilson and the movie’s saving grace, John Bradley.

And the effects on the big screen managed to distract from the sometimes forced, ‘I work for the American people and you’re keeping them in the dark,’ sentiment that made up about an eighth of the movie.

What was lacking in the emotional subtleties was glossed over with exploding cosmic rocks like fireworks and a looming, disintegrating moon pulling the ocean up and over high rise buildings.

Entertaining on the big screen and one of the better disaster movies with some attempt to dive into some interesting concepts.

What I enjoyed the most was the comedy.

So, a bit of an all-rounder.

I didn’t love it; didn’t hate it.

I had a giggle, liked the effects, made me wonder while some of the drama made me cringe.

The 355

GoMovieReviews Rating: ★★★☆ (3.2/5)The 355

Rated: M

Directed by: Simon Kinberg

Written by: Theresa Rebeck, Simon Kinberg

Produced by: Jessica Chastain, Kelly Carmichael, Simon Kinberg

Executive Producer: Richard Hewitt

Starring: Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Bingbing Fan, Diane Kruger, Lupita Nyong’o, Sebastian Stan, Edgar Ramírez.

‘They get this?  They start WWIII,’ says ex MI6 agent Khadija (Lupita Nyong’o).

And by ‘this’, she means the bad people out there getting hold of an intricate set of algorithms designed to unlock any system, in other words: a totally untraceable Master Key.

The CIA wants it, the BND (German intelligence service) wants it.  And roped into the desperate search for this potential world changing weapon are former MI6 agent, Khadija (Lupita Nyong’o) and Colombian psychologist Graciela (Penélope Cruz).

The chase crosses the globe from Paris to Morocco to Shanghai as the agents fight against each other to then be forced to work together because as Khadija says, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’

The 355 is more action than espionage as each side fights for the prize.

There’re some jumps and very near misses that ramp up the tension with visceral moments like hearing that small crack as a rib gets broken.

The storyline dabbles in the drama of these strong female leads: CIA agent, Mason Brown (Jessica Chastain) AKA Mace a loner, Graciela the out-of-her-depth psychologist wanting to get back to her family, Khadija making a go of a normal life, Chinese agent Lin Mi Sheng (Bingbing Fan) and German agent Marie (Diane Kruger) the ultimate badass and designated by the team as the one that’s the most messed up.

Director and writer Simon Kinberg (along with fellow writer Theresa Rebeck) skirts the line of working with the all-female cast without getting too girly.

Mace likens herself to James Bond but is reminded he always ends up alone.  So, the characters are given some depth in between all the hand-to-hand combat.

But there’re no real surprises here.

Yes, there’s some twists in the plot but the suspense fizzed when all the characters came into play, so the focus was more about the interaction than the tension of the story.

And I didn’t quite believe in this Master Key.

There’s still plenty of knife fights and shoot-ups and bombs exploding but the mystery fell away.  The rawness that had me in the beginning faded making The 355 an average action flick worth a watch without getting too excited about it.

The Matrix Resurrections

Rated: MThe Matrix Resurrections

Directed by: Lana Wachowski

Produced by: Grant Hill, James McTeigue, Lana Wachowski

Executive Producers: Bruce Berman, Garrett Grant, Terry Needham, Michael Salven, Karin Wachowski

Based on the Characters Created by: The Wachowskis

Screenplay Written by: Lana Wachowski, David Mitchell, Aleksandar Hemon

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Priyanka Chopra, Jessica Henwick, Yahya Adbul-Mateen II, Jonathan Groff, Daniel Bernhardt, Neil Patrick Harris, Jada Pinkett Smith, Christina Ricci, Lambert Wilson, Daniela Harpaz, Eréndira Ibarra, Max Riemelt, Ellen Hollman, Brian J. Smith.

The Matrix Resurrection introduces this sequel (forth in the series) with a 90s monitor: a square cursor flashing.  The code begins scrawling across the screen.  In green, of course.

Welcome to The Matrix 2.0.

There’re new characters resurrecting old ones: Mr. Smith (Jonathan Groff) is now Neo’s partner in a gaming company; Morpheus (Yahya Adbul-Mateen II) is back in a new form.

But Neo remains the same (Keanu Reeves).  Trinity, now Tiffany (Carrie-Anne Moss), remains.  They’re just a little older.

But non-the-wiser.

Ha, ha.

It’s that kind of movie.

There are many puns thrown through-out the film – sometimes heavy-handed like the cat with a tinkling collar named: déjà vu.

Mostly, there’s references to the original Matrix (1999) as the film layers the past into the present, so Resurrections becomes self-referential not only to the original film but also to itself.  To the extent that if a moment felt twee, the twee would then be made into a joke like a self-parody.

I noticed the silence at one point only for the silence to be commented on as an indicator of real living outside the Matrix.

It’s a cerebral film asking questions about the concept of choice: the blue or red pill?

Or is it free will versus destiny?

Or is life about fear and desire?

It becomes binary, one or the other – ones and zeros, like the program, The Matrix. Like reality is made up of ones and zeros.  Like… The Matrix. Ah!

All mind bending moments aside, it took me a while to invest in Resurrections.  Neo was somewhat lacklustre, with the repeated response, ‘yeah.’

But with the rest of the film being so clever, I guess that’s the nature of Neo.  Not Neo.  Mr. Andrews, still stuck in The Matrix.  Even so, the re-layered moments I wasn’t convinced about, like the annoying self-professed ‘geek’ colleague of Mr Anderson remained, annoying.

The film does ramp up and yes there’s a ‘fresh’ take here that will get you thinking.  I just wasn’t as convinced as the original because the characters spent so much time making fun of themselves to cover the forced sentiment that would have otherwise been too cheesy.

The Ice Road

Rated: MThe Ice Road

Directed and Written by: Jonathan Hensleigh

Director of Photography: Tom Stern

Produced by: Al Corley, Bart Rosenblatt, Eugene Musso, Shivani Rawat, Lee Nelson, David Tish

Starring: Liam Neeson, Laurence J. Fishburne III, Marcus Thomas, Amber Midthunder, Benjamin Walker, Matt McCoy, Holt McCallany, Martin Sensmeier, Matt Salinger.

Hauling heavy loads over ice is what truckers call an ice road, meaning, a suicide mission.

So much can go wrong.

And does in this action drama with Liam Neeson behind the wheel as Mike: a trucker with a one punch knockout.

He’s a trucker always getting fired looking out for his veteran brother, Gurty (Marcus Thomas) suffering from aphasia: ‘I am the only one who can understand what he is saying, and he’s a brilliant mechanic, but he does not like taking orders,’ says Neeson about his character.

After a methane pocket causes an explosion at a diamond mine, miners are trapped with a thirty-hour window until their oxygen runs out.  The only way to get drilling wellheads to free the men is to haul by truck, over an ice-road closed for the season.

Goldenrod (Laurence J. Fishburne III) is called in to get the job done.

The only way Goldenrod can see a truck making it through to the miners is by sending three trucks, in the hope one will make it through to the miners.

It’s a strategy of tactical redundancy.

Fired from yet another job, the Irish, tooth-pick in mouth trucker, Mike decides the risk is worth the reward – enough cash to put towards his own rig.  He takes one truck.

In the second is Goldenrod himself.

In the third is Tantoo (Amber Midthunder), just bailed from jail after protesting against all of North America for taking her ancestors land.

Each take a rig with two-hundred thousand on the table to share, or to go to whoever makes it to the other side, along with Insurance man, Varnay (Benjamin Walker) there to protect his company’s investment.  And Gurty’s pet rat.

The fuse is lit.

And there literally is a fuse burning to ignite dynamite at one point.  It’s that kind of movie.

With winches and d bolts and petrol in diesel tanks as sabotage.  The action’s relentless.  And by the end overdone with choppy editing to cut down the problem solving montages to speed up the action, along with splicing to another scene that worked most of the time but by the end left gaping holes.  Like, how did the rig go from full speed to idling in a second?

And why isn’t that guy with the broken leg screaming his head off?

But this ‘bull run’ about ice-truckers who can stop for nothing and no-one has the constant underlying suspense of the trucks always on the verge of cracking through the ice and sinking.

As Tantoo coolly explains to Varnay the insurance guy:

Movement causes waves so if you drive too fast, there’s too much movement.  The ice cracks.  In you go.

Too slow, the ice breaks under the weight of the rig.  In you go.

I actually yelled a few times.

The whole idea of ice-truckers is exciting to watch.

Writer and director Jonathan Hensleigh didn’t want to shoot a VFX film: “I wanted real background – the ice road, the mountain driving sequences, I wanted it all to look real.”

And seeing the rigs driven across the ice is the best part of the film.

Pairing back the action and filling the gaps so the editing wasn’t so choppy would have built on that suspense of driving those 18-wheeler rigs across ice.  With one problem after another needing to be solved, it was all a bit unbelievable by the end.

But as action movies go, Neeson always managers to pull it off.  And the storyline had enough going for it with a few twists and well-placed punches from, ‘kiss my Irish arse,’ Mike that made, The Ice Road, worth a watch.

The Suicide Squad

Rated: MA15+The Suicide Squad

Directed and Written by: James Gunn

Produced by: Charles Roven, Peter Safran

Starring: Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, Joel Kinnaman, John Cena, Viola Davis, Jai Courtney, Michael Rooker, Flula Borg, David Dastmalchian and Taika Waititi.

‘Is that rat waving at me?’

The opening scene sees the death of a pretty yellow bird.

Birds feature a lot in, The Suicide Squad mark II.

To the extent I was wondering by the end – what’s with the birds?!  Is it because they represent freedom?  Could be something in that, the squad been given a chance at freedom, etc.

Like the first film, potential members of Task Force X are found languishing in Belle Reve: the prison with the highest mortality rate in America.

Languishing until Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) offers them a deal they can’t refuse: 10 years off their sentence in hell.  Or for those not tempted by the reduced sentence, the promise not to incarcerate a ten-year-old daughter (Storm Reid) that would more than likely mean death.

Sent on another impossible bloody mission, this time to the jungle of Corto Maltese, there’s the same antics from characters such as Captain Boomerang (Michael Rooker) with a whole new cast of villains with unique skills like: Peacemaker (John Cena) who loves to walk around in his y-fronts, Bloodsport (Idris Elba) who really does not get along with Peacemaker, King Shark (Sylvester Stallone)  – apparently a god who now has a taste for human and amongst other new characters, Polka-Dot (David Dastmalchian): the man has issues.  With leader Colonel Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) back to direct the chaos.

The film has the same foundation as the first instalment, a squad of anti-heroes sent on a covert mission by the government – but way more extreme.

There’s still that manic fun tone, with the likes of Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) shooting her way to freedom with a demented smile, but I don’t remember the first instalment being so brutal.

Not that nasty is necessarily a bad thing.

I’m a big fan of gallows humour, and there were a lot of funny moments that tickled, sometimes unexpectedly like seeing the back view of Milton (Julio Cesar Ruiz), the bus driver, as he runs after the squad to ‘help out’ in his shorts and Crocs.

And making light of a trained rat, friend of Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), 2 because the first Ratcatcher was her father (Taika Waititi, yep Taika’s in it!):

‘Is that rat waving at me?

‘It appears it is’

…’Why?’

But sometimes the humour was just that bit too off-kilter – see above about the birds.

It was about 50/50 for me.  But when the humour hit, it tickled A LOT.

The narrative goes back and forth in time, highlighted by the inclusion of text in scene – leaves falling to write, ‘Now’.

There’s more clever with relief from the blood and guts when blood’s replaced with an explosion of flowers.

And that blending of scene continues with music played in the bus becoming the soundtrack, the, Pixies track, ‘Hey’ backing the squad as they walk into their next suicide mission.  Gold.

The attention to detail is impressive as director James Gunn pushes the boundaries so the humour’s darker, the violence more bloody, with an added extra tilt towards the demented.

Tending towards horror and comedy rather than action, there’s a lot of entertainment here but brace yourself, it gets twisted.

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